Eugene Pickering

“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 mediæval 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.