Eugene Pickering. Генри Джеймс

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