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.
CHAPTER II.
Madame Blumenthal seemed, for the time, to have abjured the Kursaal, and
I never caught a glimpse of her. Her young friend, apparently, was an
interesting study, and the studious mind prefers seclusion.
She reappeared, however, at last, one evening at the opera, where from my
chair I perceived her in a box, looking extremely pretty. Adelina Patti
was singing, and after the rising of the curtain I was occupied with the
stage; but on looking round when it fell for the _entr'acte_, I saw that
the authoress of "Cleopatra" had been joined by her young admirer. He
was sitting a little behind her, leaning forward, looking over her
shoulder and listening, while she, slowly moving her fan to and fro and
letting her eye wander over the house, was apparently talking of this
person and that. No doubt she was saying sharp things; but Pickering was
not laughing; his eyes were following her covert indications; his mouth
was half open, as it always was when he was interested; he looked
intensely serious. I was glad that, having her back to him, she was
unable to see how he looked. It seemed the proper moment to present
myself and make her my bow; but just as I was about to leave my place a
gentleman, whom in a moment I perceived to be an old acquaintance, came
to occupy the next chair. Recognition and mutual greetings followed, and
I was forced to postpone my visit to Madame Blumenthal. I was not sorry,
for it very soon occurred to me that Niedermeyer would be just the man to
give me a fair prose version of Pickering's lyric tributes to his friend.
He was an Austrian by birth, and had formerly lived about Europe a great
deal in a series of small diplomatic posts. England especially he had
often visited, and he spoke the language almost without accent. I had
once spent three rainy days with him in the house of an English friend in
the country. He was a sharp observer, and a good deal of a gossip; he
knew a little something about every one, and about some people
everything. His knowledge on social matters generally had the quality of
all German science; it was copious, minute, exhaustive.
"Do tell me," I said, as we stood looking round the house, "who and what
is the lady in white, with the young man sitting behind her."
"Who?" he answered, dropping his glass. "Madame Blumenthal! What! It
would take long to say. Be introduced; it's easily done; you will find
her charming. Then, after a week, you will tell me what she is."
"Perhaps I should not. My friend there has known her a week, and I don't
think he is yet able to give a coherent account of her."
He raised his glass again, and after looking a while, "I am afraid your
friend is a little--what do you call it?--a little 'soft.' Poor fellow!
he's not the first. I have never known this lady that she has not had
some eligible youth hovering about in some such attitude as that,
undergoing the softening process. She looks wonderfully well, from here.
It's extraordinary how those women last!"
"You don't mean, I take it, when you talk about 'those women,' that
Madame Blumenthal is not embalmed, for duration, in a certain infusion of
respectability?"
"Yes and no. The atmosphere that surrounds her is entirely of her own
making. There is no reason in her antecedents that people should drop
their voice when they speak of her. But some women are never at their
ease till they have given some damnable twist or other to their position
before the world. The attitude of upright virtue is unbecoming, like
sitting too straight in a fauteuil. Don't ask me for opinions, however;
content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote. Madame
Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born. I remember her mother, an
old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the
Great's grenadiers. She was poor, however, and her principles were an
insufficient dowry for Anastasia, who was married very young to a vicious
Jew, twice her own age. He was supposed to have money, but I am afraid
he had less than was nominated in the bond, or else that his pretty young
wife spent it very fast. She has been a widow these six or eight years,
and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion. I suppose
she is some six or eight and thirty years of age. In winter one hears of
her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in
summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden.
She's very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her. A year after her
marriage she published a novel, with her views on matrimony, in the
George Sand manner--beating the drum to Madame Sand's trumpet. No doubt
she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast. Since then she has
published a lot of literature--novels and poems and pamphlets on every
conceivable theme, from the conversion of Lola Montez to the Hegelian
philosophy. Her talk is much better than her writing. Her
_conjugophobia_--I can't call it by any other name--made people think
lightly of her at a time when her rebellion against marriage was probably
only theoretic. She had a taste for spinning fine phrases, she drove her
shuttle, and when she came to the end of her yarn she found that society
had turned its back. She tossed her head, declared that at last she
could breathe the sacred air of freedom, and formally announced that she
had embraced an 'intellectual' life. This meant unlimited _camaraderie_
with scribblers and daubers, Hegelian philosophers and Hungarian
pianists. But she has been admired also by a great many really clever
men; there was a time, in fact, when she turned a head as well set on its
shoulders as this one!" And Niedermeyer tapped his forehead. "She has a
great charm, and, literally, I know no harm of her. Yet for all that, I
am not going to speak to her; I am not going near her box. I am going to
leave her to say, if she does me the honour to observe the omission, that
I too have gone over to the Philistines. It's not that; it is that there
is something sinister about the woman. I am too old for it to frighten
me, but I am good-natured enough for it to pain me. Her quarrel with
society has brought her no happiness, and her outward charm is only the
mask of a dangerous discontent. Her imagination is lodged where her
heart should be! So long as you amuse it, well and good; she's radiant.
But the moment you let it flag, she is capable of dropping you without a
pang. If you land on your feet you are so much the wiser, simply; but
there have been two or three, I believe, who have almost broken their
necks in the fall."
"You are reversing your promise," I said, "and giving me an opinion, but
not an anecdote."
"This is my anecdote. A year ago a friend of mine made her acquaintance
in Berlin, and though he was no longer a young man, and had never been
what is called a susceptible one, he took a great fancy to Madame
Blumenthal. He's a major in the Prussian artillery--grizzled, grave, a
trifle severe, a man every way firm in the faith of his fathers. It's a
proof of Anastasia's charm that such a man should have got into the habit
of going to see her every day of his life. But the major was in love, or
next door to it! Every day that he called he found her scribbling away
at a little ormolu table on a lot of half-sheets of note-paper. She used
to bid him sit down and hold his tongue for a quarter of an hour, till
she had finished her chapter; she was writing a novel, and it was
promised to a publisher. Clorinda, she confided to him, was the name of
the injured heroine. The major, I imagine, had never read a work of
fiction in his life, but he knew by hearsay that Madame Blumenthal's
literature, when put forth in pink covers, was subversive of several
respectable institutions. Besides, he didn't believe in women knowing
how to write at all, and it irritated him to see this inky goddess
correcting proof-sheets under his nose--irritated him the more that, as I
say, he was in love with her and that he ventured to believe she had a
kindness for his years and his honours. And yet she was not such a woman
as he could easily ask to marry him. The result of all this was that he
fell into the way of railing at her intellectual pursuits and saying he
should like to run his sword through her pile of papers. A woman was
clever enough when she could guess her husband's wishes, and learned
enough when she could read him the newspapers. At last, one day, Madame
Blumenthal flung down her pen and announced in triumph that she had
finished her novel. Clorinda had expired in the arms of--some one else
than her husband. The major, by way of congratulating her, declared that
her novel was immoral rubbish, and that her love of vicious paradoxes was
only a peculiarly depraved form of coquetry. He added, however, that he
loved her in spite of her follies, and that if she would formally abjure
them he would as formally offer her his hand. They say that women like
to be snubbed by military men. I don't know, I'm sure; I don't know how
much pleasure, on this occasion, was mingled with Anastasia's wrath. But
her wrath was very quiet, and the major assured me it made her look
uncommonly pretty. 'I have told you before,' she says, 'that I write
from an inner need. I write to unburden my heart, to satisfy my
conscience. You call my poor efforts coquetry, vanity, the desire to
produce a sensation. I can prove to you that it is the quiet labour
itself I care for, and not the world's more or less flattering attention
to it!' And seizing the history of Clorinda she thrust it into the fire.
The major stands staring, and the first thing he knows she is sweeping
him a great curtsey and bidding him farewell for ever. Left alone and
recovering his wits, he fishes out Clorinda from the embers, and then
proceeds to thump vigorously at the lady's door. But it never opened,
and from that day to the day three months ago when he told me the tale,
he had not beheld her again."
"By Jove, it's a striking story," I said. "But the question is, what
does it prove?"
"Several things. First (what I was careful not to tell my friend), that
Madame Blumenthal cared for him a trifle more than he supposed; second,
that he cares for her more than ever; third, that the performance was a
master-stroke, and that her allowing him to force an interview upon her
again is only a question of time."
"And last?" I asked.
"This is another anecdote. The other day, Unter den Linden, I saw on a
bookseller's counter a little pink-covered romance--'Sophronia,' by
Madame Blumenthal. Glancing through it, I observed an extraordinary
abuse of asterisks; every two or three pages the narrative was adorned
with a portentous blank, crossed with a row of stars."
"Well, but poor Clorinda?" I objected, as Niedermeyer paused.
"Sophronia, my dear fellow, is simply Clorinda renamed by the baptism of
fire. The fair author came back, of course, and found Clorinda tumbled
upon the floor, a good deal scorched, but, on the whole, more frightened
than hurt. She picks her up, brushes her off, and sends her to the
printer. Wherever the flames had burnt a hole she swings a
constellation! But if the major is prepared to drop a penitent tear over
the ashes of Clorinda, I shall not whisper to him that the urn is empty."
Even Adelina Patti's singing, for the next half-hour, but half availed to
divert me from my quickened curiosity to behold Madame Blumenthal face to
face. As soon as the curtain had fallen again I repaired to her box and
was ushered in by Pickering with zealous hospitality. His glowing smile
seemed to say to me, "Ay, look for yourself, and adore!" Nothing could
have been more gracious than the lady's greeting, and I found, somewhat
to my surprise, that her prettiness lost nothing on a nearer view. Her
eyes indeed were the finest I have ever seen--the softest, the deepest,
the most intensely responsive. In spite of something faded and jaded in
her physiognomy, her movements, her smile, and the tone of her voice,
especially when she laughed, had an almost girlish frankness and
spontaneity. She looked at you very hard with her radiant gray eyes, and
she indulged while she talked in a superabundance of restless, rather
affected little gestures, as if to make you take her meaning in a certain
very particular and superfine sense. I wondered whether after a while
this might not fatigue one's attention; then meeting her charming eyes, I
said, Not for a long time. She was very clever, and, as Pickering had
said, she spoke English admirably. I told her, as I took my seat beside
her, of the fine things I had heard about her from my friend, and she
listened, letting me go on some time, and exaggerate a little, with her
fine eyes fixed full upon me. "Really?" she suddenly said, turning short
round upon Pickering, who stood behind us, and looking at him in the same
way. "Is that the way you talk about me?"
He blushed to his eyes, and I repented. She suddenly began to laugh; it
was then I observed how sweet her voice was in laughter. We talked after
this of various matters, and in a little while I complimented her on her
excellent English, and asked if she had learnt it in England.
"Heaven forbid!" she cried. "I have never been there and wish never to
go. I should never get on with the--" I wondered what she was going to
say; the fogs, the smoke, or whist with sixpenny stakes?--"I should never
get on," she said, "with the aristocracy! I am a fierce democrat--I am
not ashamed of it. I hold opinions which would make my ancestors turn in
their graves. I was born in the lap of feudalism. I am a daughter of
the crusaders. But I am a revolutionist! I have a passion for
freedom--my idea of happiness is to die on a great barricade! It's to
your great country I should like to go. I should like to see the
wonderful spectacle of a great people free to do everything it chooses,
and yet never doing anything wrong!"
I replied, modestly, that, after all, both our freedom and our good
conduct had their limits, and she turned quickly about and shook her fan
with a dramatic gesture at Pickering. "No matter, no matter!" she cried;
"I should like to see the country which produced that wonderful young
man. I think of it as a sort of Arcadia--a land of the golden age. He's
so delightfully innocent! In this stupid old Germany, if a young man is
innocent he's a fool; he has no brains; he's not a bit interesting. But
Mr. Pickering says the freshest things, and after I have laughed five
minutes at their freshness it suddenly occurs to me that they are very
wise, and I think them over for a week." "True!" she went on, nodding at
him. "I call them inspired solecisms, and I treasure them up. Remember
that when I next laugh at you!"
Glancing at Pickering, I was prompted to believe that he was in a state
of beatific exaltation which weighed Madame Blumenthal's smiles and
frowns in an equal balance. They were equally hers; they were links
alike in the golden chain. He looked at me with eyes that seemed to say,
"Did you ever hear such wit? Did you ever see such grace?" It seemed to
me that he was but vaguely conscious of the meaning of her words; her
gestures, her voice and glance, made an absorbing harmony. There is
something painful in the spectacle of absolute enthralment, even to an
excellent cause. I gave no response to Pickering's challenge, but made
some remark upon the charm of Adelina Patti's singing. Madame
Blumenthal, as became a "revolutionist," was obliged to confess that she
could see no charm in it; it was meagre, it was trivial, it lacked soul.
"You must know that in music, too," she said, "I think for myself!" And
she began with a great many flourishes of her fan to explain what it was
she thought. Remarkable things, doubtless; but I cannot answer for it,
for in the midst of the explanation the curtain rose again. "You can't
be a great artist without a great passion!" Madame Blumenthal was
affirming. Before I had time to assent Madame Patti's voice rose
wheeling like a skylark, and rained down its silver notes. "Ah, give me
that art," I whispered, "and I will leave you your passion!" And I
departed for my own place in the orchestra. I wondered afterwards
whether the speech had seemed rude, and inferred that it had not on
receiving a friendly nod from the lady, in the lobby, as the theatre was
emptying itself. She was on Pickering's arm, and he was taking her to
her carriage. Distances are short in Homburg, but the night was rainy,
and Madame Blumenthal exhibited a very pretty satin-shod foot as a reason
why, though but a penniless widow, she should not walk home. Pickering
left us together a moment while he went to hail the vehicle, and my
companion seized the opportunity, as she said, to beg me to be so very
kind as to come and see her. It was for a particular reason! It was
reason enough for me, of course, I answered, that she had given me leave.
She looked at me a moment with that extraordinary gaze of hers which
seemed so absolutely audacious in its candour, and rejoined that I paid
more compliments than our young friend there, but that she was sure I was
not half so sincere. "But it's about him I want to talk," she said. "I
want to ask you many things; I want you to tell me all about him. He
interests me; but you see my sympathies are so intense, my imagination is
so lively, that I don't trust my own impressions. They have misled me
more than once!" And she gave a little tragic shudder.
I promised to come and compare notes with her, and we bade her farewell
at her carriage door. Pickering and I remained a while, walking up and
down the long glazed gallery of the Kursaal. I had not taken many steps
before I became aware that I was beside a man in the very extremity of
love. "Isn't she wonderful?" he asked, with an implicit confidence in my
sympathy which it cost me some ingenuity to elude. If he were really in
love, well and good! For although, now that I had seen her, I stood
ready to confess to large possibilities of fascination on Madame
Blumenthal's part, and even to certain possibilities of sincerity of
which my appreciation was vague, yet it seemed to me less ominous that he
should be simply smitten than that his admiration should pique itself on
being discriminating. It was on his fundamental simplicity that I
counted for a happy termination of his experiment, and the former of
these alternatives seemed to me the simpler. I resolved to hold my
tongue and let him run his course. He had a great deal to say about his
happiness, about the days passing like hours, the hours like minutes, and
about Madame Blumenthal being a "revelation." "She was nothing
to-night," he said; "nothing to what she sometimes is in the way of
brilliancy--in the way of repartee. If you could only hear her when she
tells her adventures!"
"Adventures?" I inquired. "Has she had adventures?"
"Of the most wonderful sort!" cried Pickering, with rapture. "She hasn't
vegetated, like me! She has lived in the tumult of life. When I listen
to her reminiscences, it's like hearing the opening tumult of one of
Beethoven's symphonies as it loses itself in a triumphant harmony of
beauty and faith!"
I could only lift my eyebrows, but I desired to know before we separated
what he had done with that troublesome conscience of his. "I suppose you
know, my dear fellow," I said, "that you are simply in love. That's what
they happen to call your state of mind."
He replied with a brightening eye, as if he were delighted to hear it--"So
Madame Blumenthal told me only this morning!" And seeing, I suppose,
that I was slightly puzzled, "I went to drive with her," he continued;
"we drove to Konigstein, to see the old castle. We scrambled up into the
heart of the ruin and sat for an hour in one of the crumbling old courts.
Something in the solemn stillness of the place unloosed my tongue; and
while she sat on an ivied stone, on the edge of the plunging wall, I
stood there and made a speech. She listened to me, looking at me,
breaking off little bits of stone and letting them drop down into the
valley. At last she got up and nodded at me two or three times silently,
with a smile, as if she were applauding me for a solo on the violin. 'You
are in love,' she said. 'It's a perfect case!' And for some time she
said nothing more. But before we left the place she told me that she
owed me an answer to my speech. She thanked me heartily, but she was
afraid that if she took me at my word she would be taking advantage of my
inexperience. I had known few women; I was too easily pleased; I thought
her better than she really was. She had great faults; I must know her
longer and find them out; I must compare her with other women--women
younger, simpler, more innocent, more ignorant; and then if I still did
her the honour to think well of her, she would listen to me again. I
told her that I was not afraid of preferring any woman in the world to
her, and then she repeated, 'Happy man, happy man! you are in love, you
are in love!'"