Kitabı oku: «Eugene Pickering»

CHAPTER I

It was at Homburg, several years ago, before the gaming had been suppressed.  The evening was very warm, and all the world was gathered on the terrace of the Kursaal and the esplanade below it to listen to the excellent orchestra; or half the world, rather, for the crowd was equally dense in the gaming-rooms around the tables.  Everywhere the crowd was great.  The night was perfect, the season was at its height, the open windows of the Kursaal sent long shafts of unnatural light into the dusky woods, and now and then, in the intervals of the music, one might almost hear the clink of the napoleons and the metallic call of the croupiers rise above the watching silence of the saloons.  I had been strolling with a friend, and we at last prepared to sit down.  Chairs, however, were scarce.  I had captured one, but it seemed no easy matter to find a mate for it.  I was on the point of giving up in despair, and proposing an adjournment to the silken ottomans of the Kursaal, when I observed a young man lounging back on one of the objects of my quest, with his feet supported on the rounds of another.  This was more than his share of luxury, and I promptly approached him.  He evidently belonged to the race which has the credit of knowing best, at home and abroad, how to make itself comfortable; but something in his appearance suggested that his present attitude was the result of inadvertence rather than of egotism.  He was staring at the conductor of the orchestra and listening intently to the music.  His hands were locked round his long legs, and his mouth was half open, with rather a foolish air.  “There are so few chairs,” I said, “that I must beg you to surrender this second one.”  He started, stared, blushed, pushed the chair away with awkward alacrity, and murmured something about not having noticed that he had it.

“What an odd-looking youth!” said my companion, who had watched me, as I seated myself beside her.

“Yes, he is odd-looking; but what is odder still is that I have seen him before, that his face is familiar to me, and yet that I can’t place him.”  The orchestra was playing the Prayer from Der Freischütz, but Weber’s lovely music only deepened the blank of memory.  Who the deuce was he? where, when, how, had I known him?  It seemed extraordinary that a face should be at once so familiar and so strange.  We had our backs turned to him, so that I could not look at him again.  When the music ceased we left our places, and I went to consign my friend to her mamma on the terrace.  In passing, I saw that my young man had departed; I concluded that he only strikingly resembled some one I knew.  But who in the world was it he resembled?  The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were near by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle at roulette.  Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite to me.  He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but singularly enough, now that I observed him at my leisure, the look of familiarity quite faded from his face.  What had made us call his appearance odd was his great length and leanness of limb, his long, white neck, his blue, prominent eyes, and his ingenuous, unconscious absorption in the scene before him.  He was not handsome, certainly, but he looked peculiarly amiable and if his overt wonderment savoured a trifle of rurality, it was an agreeable contrast to the hard, inexpressive masks about him.  He was the verdant offshoot, I said to myself, of some ancient, rigid stem; he had been brought up in the quietest of homes, and he was having his first glimpse of life.  I was curious to see whether he would put anything on the table; he evidently felt the temptation, but he seemed paralysed by chronic embarrassment.  He stood gazing at the chinking complexity of losses and gains, shaking his loose gold in his pocket, and every now and then passing his hand nervously over his eyes.

Most of the spectators were too attentive to the play to have many thoughts for each other; but before long I noticed a lady who evidently had an eye for her neighbours as well as for the table.  She was seated about half-way between my friend and me, and I presently observed that she was trying to catch his eye.  Though at Homburg, as people said, “one could never be sure,” I yet doubted whether this lady were one of those whose especial vocation it was to catch a gentleman’s eye.  She was youthful rather than elderly, and pretty rather than plain; indeed, a few minutes later, when I saw her smile, I thought her wonderfully pretty.  She had a charming gray eye and a good deal of yellow hair disposed in picturesque disorder; and though her features were meagre and her complexion faded, she gave one a sense of sentimental, artificial gracefulness.  She was dressed in white muslin very much puffed and filled, but a trifle the worse for wear, relieved here and there by a pale blue ribbon.  I used to flatter myself on guessing at people’s nationality by their faces, and, as a rule, I guessed aright.  This faded, crumpled, vaporous beauty, I conceived, was a German—such a German, somehow, as I had seen imagined in literature.  Was she not a friend of poets, a correspondent of philosophers, a muse, a priestess of æsthetics—something in the way of a Bettina, a Rahel?  My conjectures, however, were speedily merged in wonderment as to what my diffident friend was making of her.  She caught his eye at last, and raising an ungloved hand, covered altogether with blue-gemmed rings—turquoises, sapphires, and lapis—she beckoned him to come to her.  The gesture was executed with a sort of practised coolness, and accompanied with an appealing smile.  He stared a moment, rather blankly, unable to suppose that the invitation was addressed to him; then, as it was immediately repeated with a good deal of intensity, he blushed to the roots of his hair, wavered awkwardly, and at last made his way to the lady’s chair.  By the time he reached it he was crimson, and wiping his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief.  She tilted back, looked up at him with the same smile, laid two fingers on his sleeve, and said something, interrogatively, to which he replied by a shake of the head.  She was asking him, evidently, if he had ever played, and he was saying no.  Old players have a fancy that when luck has turned her back on them they can put her into good-humour again by having their stakes placed by a novice.  Our young man’s physiognomy had seemed to his new acquaintance to express the perfection of inexperience, and, like a practical woman, she had determined to make him serve her turn.  Unlike most of her neighbours, she had no little pile of gold before her, but she drew from her pocket a double napoleon, put it into his hand, and bade him place it on a number of his own choosing.  He was evidently filled with a sort of delightful trouble; he enjoyed the adventure, but he shrank from the hazard.  I would have staked the coin on its being his companion’s last; for although she still smiled intently as she watched his hesitation, there was anything but indifference in her pale, pretty face.  Suddenly, in desperation, he reached over and laid the piece on the table.  My attention was diverted at this moment by my having to make way for a lady with a great many flounces, before me, to give up her chair to a rustling friend to whom she had promised it; when I again looked across at the lady in white muslin, she was drawing in a very goodly pile of gold with her little blue-gemmed claw.  Good luck and bad, at the Homburg tables, were equally undemonstrative, and this happy adventuress rewarded her young friend for the sacrifice of his innocence with a single, rapid, upward smile.  He had innocence enough left, however, to look round the table with a gleeful, conscious laugh, in the midst of which his eyes encountered my own.  Then suddenly the familiar look which had vanished from his face flickered up unmistakably; it was the boyish laugh of a boyhood’s friend.  Stupid fellow that I was, I had been looking at Eugene Pickering!

Though I lingered on for some time longer he failed to recognise me.  Recognition, I think, had kindled a smile in my own face; but, less fortunate than he, I suppose my smile had ceased to be boyish.  Now that luck had faced about again, his companion played for herself—played and won, hand over hand.  At last she seemed disposed to rest on her gains, and proceeded to bury them in the folds of her muslin.  Pickering had staked nothing for himself, but as he saw her prepare to withdraw he offered her a double napoleon and begged her to place it.  She shook her head with great decision, and seemed to bid him put it up again; but he, still blushing a good deal, pressed her with awkward ardour, and she at last took it from him, looked at him a moment fixedly, and laid it on a number.  A moment later the croupier was raking it in.  She gave the young man a little nod which seemed to say, “I told you so;” he glanced round the table again and laughed; she left her chair, and he made a way for her through the crowd.  Before going home I took a turn on the terrace and looked down on the esplanade.  The lamps were out, but the warm starlight vaguely illumined a dozen figures scattered in couples.  One of these figures, I thought, was a lady in a white dress.

I had no intention of letting Pickering go without reminding him of our old acquaintance.  He had been a very singular boy, and I was curious to see what had become of his singularity.  I looked for him the next morning at two or three of the hotels, and at last I discovered his whereabouts.  But he was out, the waiter said; he had gone to walk an hour before.  I went my way, confident that I should meet him in the evening.  It was the rule with the Homburg world to spend its evenings at the Kursaal, and Pickering, apparently, had already discovered a good reason for not being an exception.  One of the charms of Homburg is the fact that of a hot day you may walk about for a whole afternoon in unbroken shade.  The umbrageous gardens of the Kursaal mingle with the charming Hardtwald, which in turn melts away into the wooded slopes of the Taunus Mountains.  To the Hardtwald I bent my steps, and strolled for an hour through mossy glades and the still, perpendicular gloom of the fir-woods.  Suddenly, on the grassy margin of a by-path, I came upon a young man stretched at his length in the sun-checkered shade, and kicking his heels towards a patch of blue sky.  My step was so noiseless on the turf that, before he saw me, I had time to recognise Pickering again.  He looked as if he had been lounging there for some time; his hair was tossed about as if he had been sleeping; on the grass near him, beside his hat and stick, lay a sealed letter.  When he perceived me he jerked himself forward, and I stood looking at him without introducing myself—purposely, to give him a chance to recognise me.  He put on his glasses, being awkwardly near-sighted, and stared up at me with an air of general trustfulness, but without a sign of knowing me.  So at last I introduced myself.  Then he jumped up and grasped my hands, and stared and blushed and laughed, and began a dozen random questions, ending with a demand as to how in the world I had known him.

“Why, you are not changed so utterly,” I said; “and after all, it’s but fifteen years since you used to do my Latin exercises for me.”

“Not changed, eh?” he answered, still smiling, and yet speaking with a sort of ingenuous dismay.

Then I remembered that poor Pickering had been, in those Latin days, a victim of juvenile irony.  He used to bring a bottle of medicine to school and take a dose in a glass of water before lunch; and every day at two o’clock, half an hour before the rest of us were liberated, an old nurse with bushy eyebrows came and fetched him away in a carriage.  His extremely fair complexion, his nurse, and his bottle of medicine, which suggested a vague analogy with the sleeping-potion in the tragedy, caused him to be called Juliet.  Certainly Romeo’s sweetheart hardly suffered more; she was not, at least, a standing joke in Verona.  Remembering these things, I hastened to say to Pickering that I hoped he was still the same good fellow who used to do my Latin for me.  “We were capital friends, you know,” I went on, “then and afterwards.”

“Yes, we were very good friends,” he said, “and that makes it the stranger I shouldn’t have known you.  For you know, as a boy, I never had many friends, nor as a man either.  You see,” he added, passing his hand over his eyes, “I am rather dazed, rather bewildered at finding myself for the first time—alone.”  And he jerked back his shoulders nervously, and threw up his head, as if to settle himself in an unwonted position.  I wondered whether the old nurse with the bushy eyebrows had remained attached to his person up to a recent period, and discovered presently that, virtually at least, she had.  We had the whole summer day before us, and we sat down on the grass together and overhauled our old memories.  It was as if we had stumbled upon an ancient cupboard in some dusky corner, and rummaged out a heap of childish playthings—tin soldiers and torn story-books, jack-knives and Chinese puzzles.  This is what we remembered between us.

He had made but a short stay at school—not because he was tormented, for he thought it so fine to be at school at all that he held his tongue at home about the sufferings incurred through the medicine-bottle, but because his father thought he was learning bad manners.  This he imparted to me in confidence at the time, and I remember how it increased my oppressive awe of Mr. Pickering, who had appeared to me in glimpses as a sort of high priest of the proprieties.  Mr. Pickering was a widower—a fact which seemed to produce in him a sort of preternatural concentration of parental dignity.  He was a majestic man, with a hooked nose, a keen dark eye, very large whiskers, and notions of his own as to how a boy—or his boy, at any rate—should be brought up.  First and foremost, he was to be a “gentleman”; which seemed to mean, chiefly, that he was always to wear a muffler and gloves, and be sent to bed, after a supper of bread and milk, at eight o’clock.  School-life, on experiment, seemed hostile to these observances, and Eugene was taken home again, to be moulded into urbanity beneath the parental eye.  A tutor was provided for him, and a single select companion was prescribed.  The choice, mysteriously, fell on me, born as I was under quite another star; my parents were appealed to, and I was allowed for a few months to have my lessons with Eugene.  The tutor, I think, must have been rather a snob, for Eugene was treated like a prince, while I got all the questions and the raps with the ruler.  And yet I remember never being jealous of my happier comrade, and striking up, for the time, one of those friendships of childhood.  He had a watch and a pony and a great store of picture-books, but my envy of these luxuries was tempered by a vague compassion which left me free to be generous.  I could go out to play alone, I could button my jacket myself, and sit up till I was sleepy.  Poor Pickering could never take a step without asking leave, or spend half an hour in the garden without a formal report of it when he came in.  My parents, who had no desire to see me inoculated with importunate virtues, sent me back to school at the end of six months.  After that I never saw Eugene.  His father went to live in the country, to protect the lad’s morals, and Eugene faded, in reminiscence, into a pale image of the depressing effects of education.  I think I vaguely supposed that he would melt into thin air, and indeed began gradually to doubt of his existence, and to regard him as one of the foolish things one ceased to believe in as one grew older.  It seemed natural that I should have no more news of him.  Our present meeting was my first assurance that he had really survived all that muffling and coddling.

I observed him now with a good deal of interest, for he was a rare phenomenon—the fruit of a system persistently and uninterruptedly applied.  He struck me, in a fashion, as certain young monks I had seen in Italy; he had the same candid, unsophisticated cloister face.  His education had been really almost monastic.  It had found him evidently a very compliant, yielding subject; his gentle affectionate spirit was not one of those that need to be broken.  It had bequeathed him, now that he stood on the threshold of the great world, an extraordinary freshness of impression and alertness of desire, and I confess that, as I looked at him and met his transparent blue eye, I trembled for the unwarned innocence of such a soul.  I became aware, gradually, that the world had already wrought a certain work upon him and roused him to a restless, troubled self-consciousness.  Everything about him pointed to an experience from which he had been debarred; his whole organism trembled with a dawning sense of unsuspected possibilities of feeling.  This appealing tremor was indeed outwardly visible.  He kept shifting himself about on the grass, thrusting his hands through his hair, wiping a light perspiration from his forehead, breaking out to say something and rushing off to something else.  Our sudden meeting had greatly excited him, and I saw that I was likely to profit by a certain overflow of sentimental fermentation.  I could do so with a good conscience, for all this trepidation filled me with a great friendliness.

“It’s nearly fifteen years, as you say,” he began, “since you used to call me ‘butter-fingers’ for always missing the ball.  That’s a long time to give an account of, and yet they have been, for me, such eventless, monotonous years, that I could almost tell their history in ten words.  You, I suppose, have had all kinds of adventures and travelled over half the world.  I remember you had a turn for deeds of daring; I used to think you a little Captain Cook in roundabouts, for climbing the garden fence to get the ball when I had let it fly over.  I climbed no fences then or since.  You remember my father, I suppose, and the great care he took of me?  I lost him some five months ago.  From those boyish days up to his death we were always together.  I don’t think that in fifteen years we spent half a dozen hours apart.  We lived in the country, winter and summer, seeing but three or four people.  I had a succession of tutors, and a library to browse about in; I assure you I am a tremendous scholar.  It was a dull life for a growing boy, and a duller life for a young man grown, but I never knew it.  I was perfectly happy.”  He spoke of his father at some length, and with a respect which I privately declined to emulate.  Mr. Pickering had been, to my sense, a frigid egotist, unable to conceive of any larger vocation for his son than to strive to reproduce so irreproachable a model.  “I know I have been strangely brought up,” said my friend, “and that the result is something grotesque; but my education, piece by piece, in detail, became one of my father’s personal habits, as it were.  He took a fancy to it at first through his intense affection for my mother and the sort of worship he paid her memory.  She died at my birth, and as I grew up, it seems that I bore an extraordinary likeness to her.  Besides, my father had a great many theories; he prided himself on his conservative opinions; he thought the usual American laisser-aller in education was a very vulgar practice, and that children were not to grow up like dusty thorns by the wayside.”  “So you see,” Pickering went on, smiling and blushing, and yet with something of the irony of vain regret, “I am a regular garden plant.  I have been watched and watered and pruned, and if there is any virtue in tending I ought to take the prize at a flower show.  Some three years ago my father’s health broke down, and he was kept very much within doors.  So, although I was a man grown, I lived altogether at home.  If I was out of his sight for a quarter of an hour he sent some one after me.  He had severe attacks of neuralgia, and he used to sit at his window, basking in the sun.  He kept an opera-glass at hand, and when I was out in the garden he used to watch me with it.  A few days before his death I was twenty-seven years old, and the most innocent youth, I suppose, on the continent.  After he died I missed him greatly,” Pickering continued, evidently with no intention of making an epigram.  “I stayed at home, in a sort of dull stupor.  It seemed as if life offered itself to me for the first time, and yet as if I didn’t know how to take hold of it.”

“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.

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 Gräfin, 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.”