Eugene Pickering

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EUGENE PICKERING
by Henry James


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 Freischutz, 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
aesthetics--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."

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 certain 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 have not sailed round the world, as you suppose," I said, "but I
confess I envy you the novelties you are going to behold. Coming to
Homburg you have 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 he suddenly laid
his hand on my arm, looked at me 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
is 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 that
is 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
have lived more in the past six weeks than in all the years that preceded
them. I am filled with this feverish sense of liberation; it keeps
rising to my head like the fumes of strong wine. I find I am 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 there like a great
surging sea, where we must plunge 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 am full of impulses, but, somehow, I am 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 shouldn'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 doesn'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 that it comes back--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 perplexity.
"'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 scruples or at what
possibly strikes you as my depravity. I doubt," he went on gravely,
"whether I have an inclination toward wrong-doing; if I have, I am sure I
shall not prosper in it. I honestly believe I may safely take out a
license to amuse myself. But it isn'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, colourless, impersonal precept. You would understand all this
better if you could breathe for an hour the musty in-door 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_!"