Eugene Pickering

“The whole story!  I have given it up—I have thrown it to the winds.  I have broken utterly with the past.  It may rise in its grave and give me its curse, but it can’t frighten me now.  I have a right to be happy, I have a right to be free, I have a right not to bury myself alive.  It was not I who promised—I was not born then.  I myself, my soul, my mind, my option—all this is but a month old!  Ah,” he went on, “if you knew the difference it makes—this having chosen and broken and spoken!  I am twice the man I was yesterday!  Yesterday I was afraid of her; there was a kind of mocking mystery of knowledge and cleverness about her, which oppressed me in the midst of my love.  But now I am afraid of nothing but of being too happy!”

I stood silent, to let him spend his eloquence.  But he paused a moment, and took off his hat and fanned himself.  “Let me perfectly understand,” I said at last.  “You have asked Madame Blumenthal to be your wife?”

“The wife of my intelligent choice!”

“And does she consent?”

“She asks three days to decide.”

“Call it four!  She has known your secret since this morning.  I am bound to let you know I told her.”

“So much the better!” cried Pickering, without apparent resentment or surprise.  “It’s not a brilliant offer for such a woman, and in spite of what I have at stake, I feel that it would be brutal to press her.”

“What does she say to your breaking your promise?” I asked in a moment.

Pickering was too much in love for false shame.  “She tells me that she loves me too much to find courage to condemn me.  She agrees with me that I have a right to be happy.  I ask no exemption from the common law.  What I claim is simply freedom to try to be!”

Of course I was puzzled; it was not in that fashion that I had expected Madame Blumenthal to make use of my information.  But the matter now was quite out of my hands, and all I could do was to bid my companion not work himself into a fever over either fortune.

The next day I had a visit from Niedermeyer, on whom, after our talk at the opera, I had left a card.  We gossiped a while, and at last he said suddenly, “By the way, I have a sequel to the history of Clorinda.  The major is at Homburg!”

“Indeed!” said I.  “Since when?”

“These three days.”

“And what is he doing?”

“He seems,” said Niedermeyer, with a laugh, “to be chiefly occupied in sending flowers to Madame Blumenthal.  That is, I went with him the morning of his arrival to choose a nosegay, and nothing would suit him but a small haystack of white roses.  I hope it was received.”

“I can assure you it was,” I cried.  “I saw the lady fairly nestling her head in it.  But I advise the major not to build upon that.  He has a rival.”

“Do you mean the soft young man of the other night?”

“Pickering is soft, if you will, but his softness seems to have served him.  He has offered her everything, and she has not yet refused it.”  I had handed my visitor a cigar, and he was puffing it in silence.  At last he abruptly asked if I had been introduced to Madame Blumenthal, and, on my affirmative, inquired what I thought of her.  “I will not tell you,” I said, “or you’ll call me soft.”

He knocked away his ashes, eyeing me askance.  “I have noticed your friend about,” he said, “and even if you had not told me, I should have known he was in love.  After he has left his adored, his face wears for the rest of the day the expression with which he has risen from her feet, and more than once I have felt like touching his elbow, as you would that of a man who has inadvertently come into a drawing-room in his overshoes.  You say he has offered our friend everything; but, my dear fellow, he has not everything to offer her.  He evidently is as amiable as the morning, but the lady has no taste for daylight.”

“I assure you Pickering is a very interesting fellow,” I said.

“Ah, there it is!  Has he not some story or other?  Isn’t he an orphan, or a natural child, or consumptive, or contingent heir to great estates?  She will read his little story to the end, and close the book very tenderly and smooth down the cover; and then, when he least expects it, she will toss it into the dusty limbo of her other romances.  She will let him dangle, but she will let him drop!”

“Upon my word,” I cried, with heat, “if she does, she will be a very unprincipled little creature!”

Niedermeyer shrugged his shoulders.  “I never said she was a saint!”

Shrewd as I felt Niedermeyer to be, I was not prepared to take his simple word for this event, and in the evening I received a communication which fortified my doubts.  It was a note from Pickering, and it ran as follows:—

“My Dear Friend—I have every hope of being happy, but I am to go to Wiesbaden to learn my fate.  Madame Blumenthal goes thither this afternoon to spend a few days, and she allows me to accompany her.  Give me your good wishes; you shall hear of the result.

E. P.”

One of the diversions of Homburg for new-comers is to dine in rotation at the different tables d’hôte.  It so happened that, a couple of days later, Niedermeyer took pot-luck at my hotel, and secured a seat beside my own.  As we took our places I found a letter on my plate, and, as it was postmarked Wiesbaden, I lost no time in opening it.  It contained but three lines—

“I am happy—I am accepted—an hour ago.  I can hardly believe it’s your poor friend

E. P.”

I placed the note before Niedermeyer; not exactly in triumph, but with the alacrity of all felicitous confutation.  He looked at it much longer than was needful to read it, stroking down his beard gravely, and I felt it was not so easy to confute a pupil of the school of Metternich.  At last, folding the note and handing it back, “Has your friend mentioned Madame Blumenthal’s errand at Wiesbaden?” he asked.

“You look very wise.  I give it up!” said I.

“She is gone there to make the major follow her.  He went by the next train.”

“And has the major, on his side, dropped you a line?”

“He is not a letter-writer.”

“Well,” said I, pocketing my letter, “with this document in my hand I am bound to reserve my judgment.  We will have a bottle of Johannisberg, and drink to the triumph of virtue.”

For a whole week more I heard nothing from Pickering—somewhat to my surprise, and, as the days went by, not a little to my discomposure.  I had expected that his bliss would continue to overflow in brief bulletins, and his silence was possibly an indication that it had been clouded.  At last I wrote to his hotel at Wiesbaden, but received no answer; whereupon, as my next resource, I repaired to his former lodging at Homburg, where I thought it possible he had left property which he would sooner or later send for.  There I learned that he had indeed just telegraphed from Cologne for his luggage.  To Cologne I immediately despatched a line of inquiry as to his prosperity and the cause of his silence.  The next day I received three words in answer—a simple uncommented request that I would come to him.  I lost no time, and reached him in the course of a few hours.  It was dark when I arrived, and the city was sheeted in a cold autumnal rain.  Pickering had stumbled, with an indifference which was itself a symptom of distress, on a certain musty old Mainzerhof, and I found him sitting over a smouldering fire in a vast dingy chamber which looked as if it had grown gray with watching the ennui of ten generations of travellers.  Looking at him, as he rose on my entrance, I saw that he was in extreme tribulation.  He was pale and haggard; his face was five years older.  Now, at least, in all conscience, he had tasted of the cup of life!  I was anxious to know what had turned it so suddenly to bitterness; but I spared him all importunate curiosity, and let him take his time.  I accepted tacitly his tacit confession of distress, and we made for a while a feeble effort to discuss the picturesqueness of Cologne.  At last he rose and stood a long time looking into the fire, while I slowly paced the length of the dusky room.

“Well!” he said, as I came back; “I wanted knowledge, and I certainly know something I didn’t a month ago.”  And herewith, calmly and succinctly enough, as if dismay had worn itself out, he related the history of the foregoing days.  He touched lightly on details; he evidently never was to gush as freely again as he had done during the prosperity of his suit.  He had been accepted one evening, as explicitly as his imagination could desire, and had gone forth in his rapture and roamed about till nearly morning in the gardens of the Conversation-house, taking the stars and the perfumes of the summer night into his confidence.  “It is worth it all, almost,” he said, “to have been wound up for an hour to that celestial pitch.  No man, I am sure, can ever know it but once.”  The next morning he had repaired to Madame Blumenthal’s lodging and had been met, to his amazement, by a naked refusal to see him.  He had strode about for a couple of hours—in another mood—and then had returned to the charge.  The servant handed him a three-cornered note; it contained these words: “Leave me alone to-day; I will give you ten minutes to-morrow evening.”  Of the next thirty-six hours he could give no coherent account, but at the appointed time Madame Blumenthal had received him.  Almost before she spoke there had come to him a sense of the depth of his folly in supposing he knew her.  “One has heard all one’s days,” he said, “of people removing the mask; it’s one of the stock phrases of romance.  Well, there she stood with her mask in her hand.  Her face,” he went on gravely, after a pause—“her face was horrible!” . . . “I give you ten minutes,” she had said, pointing to the clock.  “Make your scene, tear your hair, brandish your dagger!”  And she had sat down and folded her arms.  “It’s not a joke,” she cried, “it’s dead earnest; let us have it over.  You are dismissed—have you nothing to say?”  He had stammered some frantic demand for an explanation; and she had risen and come near him, looking at him from head to feet, very pale, and evidently more excited than she wished him to see.  “I have done with you!” she said, with a smile; “you ought to have done with me!  It has all been delightful, but there are excellent reasons why it should come to an end.” “You have been playing a part, then,” he had gasped out; “you never cared for me?”  “Yes; till I knew you; till I saw how far you would go.  But now the story’s finished; we have reached the dénoûment.  We will close the book and be good friends.”  “To see how far I would go?” he had repeated.  “You led me on, meaning all the while to do this!”  “I led you on, if you will.  I received your visits, in season and out!  Sometimes they were very entertaining; sometimes they bored me fearfully.  But you were such a very curious case of—what shall I call it?—of sincerity, that I determined to take good and bad together.  I wanted to make you commit yourself unmistakably.  I should have preferred not to bring you to this place; but that too was necessary.  Of course I can’t marry you; I can do better.  So can you, for that matter; thank your fate for it.  You have thought wonders of me for a month, but your good-humour wouldn’t last.  I am too old and too wise; you are too young and too foolish.  It seems to me that I have been very good to you; I have entertained you to the top of your bent, and, except perhaps that I am a little brusque just now, you have nothing to complain of.  I would have let you down more gently if I could have taken another month to it; but circumstances have forced my hand.  Abuse me, curse me, if you like.  I will make every allowance!”  Pickering listened to all this intently enough to perceive that, as if by some sudden natural cataclysm, the ground had broken away at his feet, and that he must recoil.  He turned away in dumb amazement.  “I don’t know how I seemed to be taking it,” he said, “but she seemed really to desire—I don’t know why—something in the way of reproach and vituperation.  But I couldn’t, in that way, have uttered a syllable.  I was sickened; I wanted to get away into the air—to shake her off and come to my senses.  ‘Have you nothing, nothing, nothing to say?’ she cried, as if she were disappointed, while I stood with my hand on the door.  ‘Haven’t I treated you to talk enough?’ I believed I answered.  ‘You will write to me then, when you get home?’  ‘I think not,’ said I.  ‘Six months hence, I fancy, you will come and see me!’  ‘Never!’ said I.  ‘That’s a confession of stupidity,’ she answered.  ‘It means that, even on reflection, you will never understand the philosophy of my conduct.’  The word ‘philosophy’ seemed so strange that I verily believe I smiled.  ‘I have given you all that you gave me,’ she went on.  ‘Your passion was an affair of the head.’  ‘I only wish you had told me sooner that you considered it so!’ I exclaimed.  And I went my way.  The next day I came down the Rhine.  I sat all day on the boat, not knowing where I was going, where to get off.  I was in a kind of ague of terror; it seemed to me I had seen something infernal.  At last I saw the cathedral towers here looming over the city.  They seemed to say something to me, and when the boat stopped, I came ashore.  I have been here a week.  I have not slept at night—and yet it has been a week of rest!”

It seemed to me that he was in a fair way to recover, and that his own philosophy, if left to take its time, was adequate to the occasion.  After his story was once told I referred to his grievance but once—that evening, later, as we were about to separate for the night.  “Suffer me to say that there was some truth in her account of your relations,” I said.  “You were using her intellectually, and all the while, without your knowing it, she was using you.  It was diamond cut diamond.  Her needs were the more superficial, and she got tired of the game first.”  He frowned and turned uneasily away, but without contradicting me.  I waited a few moments, to see if he would remember, before we parted, that he had a claim to make upon me.  But he seemed to have forgotten it.

The next day we strolled about the picturesque old city, and of course, before long, went into the cathedral.  Pickering said little; he seemed intent upon his own thoughts.  He sat down beside a pillar near a chapel, in front of a gorgeous window, and, leaving him to his meditations, I wandered through the church.  When I came back I saw he had something to say.  But before he had spoken I laid my hand on his shoulder and looked at him with a significant smile.  He slowly bent his head and dropped his eyes, with a mixture of assent and humility.  I drew forth from where it had lain untouched for a month the letter he had given me to keep, placed it silently on his knee, and left him to deal with it alone.

Half an hour later I returned to the same place, but he had gone, and one of the sacristans, hovering about and seeing me looking for Pickering, said he thought he had left the church.  I found him in his gloomy chamber at the inn, pacing slowly up and down.  I should doubtless have been at a loss to say just what effect I expected the letter from Smyrna to produce; but his actual aspect surprised me.  He was flushed, excited, a trifle irritated.

“Evidently,” I said, “you have read your letter.”

“It is proper I should tell you what is in it,” he answered.  “When I gave it to you a month ago, I did my friends injustice.”

“You called it a ‘summons,’ I remember.”

“I was a great fool!  It’s a release!”

“From your engagement?”

“From everything!  The letter, of course, is from Mr. Vernor.  He desires to let me know at the earliest moment that his daughter, informed for the first time a week before of what had been expected of her, positively refuses to be bound by the contract or to assent to my being bound.  She had been given a week to reflect, and had spent it in inconsolable tears.  She had resisted every form of persuasion! from compulsion, writes Mr. Vernor, he naturally shrinks.  The young lady considers the arrangement ‘horrible.’  After accepting her duties cut and dried all her life, she pretends at last to have a taste of her own.  I confess I am surprised; I had been given to believe that she was stupidly submissive, and would remain so to the end of the chapter.  Not a bit of it.  She has insisted on my being formally dismissed, and her father intimates that in case of non-compliance she threatens him with an attack of brain fever.  Mr. Vernor condoles with me handsomely, and lets me know that the young lady’s attitude has been a great shock to his nerves.  He adds that he will not aggravate such regret as I may do him the honour to entertain, by any allusions to his daughter’s charms and to the magnitude of my loss, and he concludes with the hope that, for the comfort of all concerned, I may already have amused my fancy with other ‘views.’  He reminds me in a postscript that, in spite of this painful occurrence, the son of his most valued friend will always be a welcome visitor at his house.  I am free, he observes; I have my life before me; he recommends an extensive course of travel.  Should my wanderings lead me to the East, he hopes that no false embarrassment will deter me from presenting myself at Smyrna.  He can promise me at least a friendly reception.  It’s a very polite letter.”

Polite as the letter was, Pickering seemed to find no great exhilaration in having this famous burden so handsomely lifted from his spirit.  He began to brood over his liberation in a manner which you might have deemed proper to a renewed sense of bondage.  “Bad news,” he had called his letter originally; and yet, now that its contents proved to be in flat contradiction to his foreboding, there was no impulsive voice to reverse the formula and declare the news was good.  The wings of impulse in the poor fellow had of late been terribly clipped.  It was an obvious reflection, of course, that if he had not been so stiffly certain of the matter a month before, and had gone through the form of breaking Mr. Vernor’s seal, he might have escaped the purgatory of Madame Blumenthal’s sub-acid blandishments.  But I left him to moralise in private; I had no desire, as the phrase is, to rub it in.  My thoughts, moreover, were following another train; I was saying to myself that if to those gentle graces of which her young visage had offered to my fancy the blooming promise, Miss Vernor added in this striking measure the capacity for magnanimous action, the amendment to my friend’s career had been less happy than the rough draught.  Presently, turning about, I saw him looking at the young lady’s photograph.  “Of course, now,” he said, “I have no right to keep it!”  And before I could ask for another glimpse of it, he had thrust it into the fire.

“I am sorry to be saying it just now,” I observed after a while, “but I shouldn’t wonder if Miss Vernor were a charming creature.”

“Go and find out,” he answered, gloomily.  “The coast is clear.  My part is to forget her,” he presently added.  “It ought not to be hard.  But don’t you think,” he went on suddenly, “that for a poor fellow who asked nothing of fortune but leave to sit down in a quiet corner, it has been rather a cruel pushing about?”

Cruel indeed, I declared, and he certainly had the right to demand a clean page on the book of fate and a fresh start.  Mr. Vernor’s advice was sound; he should amuse himself with a long journey.  If it would be any comfort to him, I would go with him on his way.  Pickering assented without enthusiasm; he had the embarrassed look of a man who, having gone to some cost to make a good appearance in a drawing-room, should find the door suddenly slammed in his face.  We started on our journey, however, and little by little his enthusiasm returned.  He was too capable of enjoying fine things to remain permanently irresponsive, and after a fortnight spent among pictures and monuments and antiquities, I felt that I was seeing him for the first time in his best and healthiest mood.  He had had a fever, and then he had had a chill; the pendulum had swung right and left in a manner rather trying to the machine; but now, at last, it was working back to an even, natural beat.  He recovered in a measure the generous eloquence with which he had fanned his flame at Homburg, and talked about things with something of the same passionate freshness.  One day when I was laid up at the inn at Bruges with a lame foot, he came home and treated me to a rhapsody about a certain meek-faced virgin of Hans Memling, which seemed to me sounder sense than his compliments to Madame Blumenthal.  He had his dull days and his sombre moods—hours of irresistible retrospect; but I let them come and go without remonstrance, because I fancied they always left him a trifle more alert and resolute.  One evening, however, he sat hanging his head in so doleful a fashion that I took the bull by the horns and told him he had by this time surely paid his debt to penitence, and that he owed it to himself to banish that woman for ever from his thoughts.