Eugene Pickering | Page 8

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