 | I. A passionate pilgrim |  |
1. 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
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 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 's odd-looking; but what is odder still is
that I 've 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 Freischütz, but Weber's
lovely music only deepened the blank of memory.
Who the deuce was he? where, when, how, had I
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 savored 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
see whether he would put anything on the table; he
evidently felt the temptation, but he seemed paralyzed
by chronic embarrassment. He stood gazing at the
rattling cross-fire 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
neighbors 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 was
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 blond 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 frilled, 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
aright. This faded, crumpled, vaporous beauty, I conceived,
was a German, — such a German, somehow,
as I had seen imaged in literature. Was she not a
friend of poets, a correspondent of philosophers, a
muse, a priestess of æsthetics, — something in the
way of a Bettina, a Rahel? My conjectures, however,
were speedily merged in wonderment as to what
my different 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,
their stakes placed by an absolute 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 neighbors,
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 fair adventuress rewarded
her young friend for the sacrifice of his innocence
with a single, rapid, upward smile. He had innocence
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 recognize 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, urged
her with awkward ardor, 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
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 droll boy, and I was curious to see what had
become of his drollery. I looked for him the next
morning at two or three of the hotels, and at last
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
sky. My step was so noiseless on the turf, that before
he saw me, I had time to recognize 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 elucidating, — purposely, to
give him a chance to recognize 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 're 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
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 phial of poison 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 should n'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 'm dazed and 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
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
prescribed. The choice, mysteriously, fell upon 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, a huge boyish friendship.
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 a prior petition, 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
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, like 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
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 'm a tremendous scholar. It
was a dull life for a growing boy, and a duller life for
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 cold
egotist, unable to conceive of any larger vocation for
his son than to became a mechanical reflection of himself.
“I know I 've 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
laissez 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 'm a regular garden plant.
I 've 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
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 did n'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 certaint 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 've not sailed round the world, as you suppose,”
I said, “but I confess I envy you the novelties you
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
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 's 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, 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 've lived more in the past six weeks than
in all the years that preceded them. I 'm filled with
this feverish sense of liberation; it keeps rising to my
head like the fumes of strong wine. I find I 'm 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
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 'm full of impulses, but, somehow,
I 'm 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 should n'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 does n'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 there
comes and comes again 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 intensity. “`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 trepidation or at what possibly strikes you as my
have an inclination toward wrong-doing; if I have,
I 'm sure I sha' n't prosper in it. I honestly believe I
may safely take out a license to amuse myself. But
it is n'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, colorless,
impersonal precept. You would understand all this
better if you could breathe for an hour the musty indoor
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 seclusion makes you
think the world better worth knowing than you 're
likely to find it. A man with as good a head and
heart as yours has a very ample world within himself,
and I 'm 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 've 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
pocket the letter of which I 've spoken, held it up,
and shook it solemnly. “What is it?” I asked.
“It 's 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 's 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 invitations to destiny, my destiny is
settled and sealed. I 'm engaged, — I 'm given in
marriage. It 's a bequest of the past, — the past I
never said nay to! 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 rigid seclusion in which I was
spending my days. To this day, I 'm 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
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 precept adapted to the conduct of a gentleman
toward a friend in pecuniary embarrassment.
What's more, he was sure to adhere to it. Mr. Vernor,
I believe, got on his feet, paid his debt, and owed
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 've 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 's
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 're to marry!”
He related all this calmly enough, without the accent
of complaint, dryly rather and doggedly, as if he
were weary of thinking of it. “It 's a romance indeed,”
I said, “for these dull days, and I heartily
congratulate you. It 's not every young man who
finds, on reaching the marrying age, a wife kept in
charming; I wonder you don't post off to Smyrna.”
“You 're joking,” he answered, with a wounded air,
“and I am terribly serious. Let me tell you the rest.
I never suspected this tender conspiracy till something
less than a year ago. My father, wishing to provide
against his death, informed me of it, 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 dozen new
shirts. I supposed that it was under some such punctual,
superterrestrial dispensation as this that all young
men were married. Novels and poems indeed said
otherwise; 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 sha' n't last long,' he said, `but I am
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 sha' n't 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 had a thought but for your own personal
advantage. To foresee your future, in its main outline,
to know to a certainty that you 'll 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 myriad nameless
temptations to perversity. The fumes of unrighteous
pride may rise into your brain and tempt
you, in the interest of a vain delusion 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
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.'
There was something portentous in this rigid
summons. 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 vain delusion 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 rest had been
sown in those unsuspecting years, — as if after many
days I might gather the mellow fruit. But after many
days! I 'll keep my promise, I 'll obey; but I want
to live first!”
“My dear fellow, you 're 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
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 'm 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 n't 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 'm sure
you 'll 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
these many weeks 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 favor? 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 does n't last forever.”
“Does it last a month? Let that be my season! A
month hence you 'll 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 humor the poor fellow would seem to be saying that
I thought his demand 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
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 radiant frankness.
“Ah, you saw then,” he cried, “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.”
“Verily! And did you go in?”
“No, she said it was too late to ask me; though in
a general way, she declared 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 was
staring at me; but her manner was so gracious and
reassuring that I concluded 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
she chooses.”
“In other words, she is a lady with no reputation to
lose?”
Pickering seemed puzzled, and smiled a little. “Is
n't that what you say of bad women?”
“Of some — of those who are found out.”
“Well,” he said, still smiling, “I have n't yet found
out Madame Blumenthal.”
“If that 's her name, I suppose she 's German.”
“Yes; but she speaks English so well that you
might almost doubt it. She is very clever. Her husband
's 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 an edge 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 've had the desire
for three months; I 've known Madame Blumenthal for
less than twenty-four hours.”
“Very true. But when you found this letter of
yours on your plate at breakfast, did you seem for a
moment to see Madame Blumenthal sitting opposite?”
“Opposite?” he repeated, frowning gently.
“Opposite, my dear fellow, or anywhere in the
neighborhood. In a word, does she interest you?”
“Very much!” he cried, with his frown clearing
away.
“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 revolving his quaint history 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
dark eyes fixed. But her awkwardness was as pretty
as that of some angular seraph in a mediæval carving,
and in her sober gaze there seemed to lurk the questioning
gleam of childhood. “What is this for?” her
charming eyes appeared to ask; “why have I been
decked, 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 's lovely!”
“Yes, poor girl, she 's lovely — 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 's something I 've 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 check her numbers for her at
roulette again.”
“Not at all!” cried Pickering, with a smile of
triumph. “She says that she plays 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, — command
me.”
I did n'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 an obstacle. 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 'll 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,
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?” I inquired.
“It 's not a grammar; it 's a tragedy.” And he
handed me the book.
I opened it, and beheld, in delicate type, in a very
large margin, a 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, toward 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
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, and irresponsive
to my experimental observations on vulgar topics,
— the hot weather, the inn, the advent of Adelina
Patti. At last he uttered his thoughts, and announced
that Madame Blumenthal had turned out
an extraordinarily interesting woman. He seemed to
have quite forgotten our long talk in the Hardtwald,
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 hinted that it behooved
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
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 regulate that fine machinery. 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 fasion, 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 awhile, to measure people by my
narrow precedents. I never saw a gaming-table in
my life before, and supposed that a gamester 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 recognized source of subsistence for
decent people with small means. But I confess
Madame Blumenthal might do worse things than
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 was 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 multifarious impulses and accomplishments nothing
would be easier than that she should seem restless
and over-eager and importunate. You will know
her, and I leave you to judge whether she does.
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 penetrating perfume of intelligence,
mingled with a penetrating perfume of sympathy.”
“Madame Blumenthal,” I said, smiling, “might be
the loveliest woman in the world, and you the object
of her choicest favors, 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
hope I shall be a long time coming to that.”
“You 'll 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 lovely 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 stars above a miasmatic frog-pond.”
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,
“which must have seemed to her terribly farcical;
having poured them out before her; 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 's wise, she knows,
she has felt, she has suffered, and now she understands!”
“She told you, I imagine, that she understood you
to a t, 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, in effect, formally, all the offices of a
woman's friendship.”
“Which you as formally accepted?”
“To you the scene sounds absurd, I suppose, but
allow ne to say I don't care!” Pickering cried, with
an air of genial aggression 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 could n't; I had had plenty to say
before, but now I stammered and bungled, and at last
I took refuge in an abrupt retreat.”
“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 had my claws clipped 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.
I wished, on the one hand, to let Pickering work
out his destiny without temptation, on my part, to
play providence; and, on the other hand, I had at
Homburg a group of friends with whom for another
week I had promised to spend my leisure hours. For
some days I saw little of Pickering, 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, which Madame
Blumenthal had gathered up into her comprehensive
soul. He seemed very happy, and gave me in a dozen
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
seclusion had not, to make it bright and fine. Every
now and then I was struck with his deep enjoyment
of some new spectacle, — often trifling enough, — something
foreign, local, picturesque, some detail of manner,
some accident of scenery; and of 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 manhood in a graver fashion;
as one might arrive somewhere, after delays, in
some quiet after-hour which should transmute disappointment
into gratitude for the preternatural vividness
of first impressions. Each time I met him he
spoke a little less of Madame Blumenthal, but let me
know generally that he saw her often, and continued
to admire her — tremendously! I was forced to admit
to myself, in spite of preconceptions, that if she was
really the ruling star of this serene efflorescence, she
must be a very fine 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.
| I. A passionate pilgrim | |