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, Isuppose, 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 Ididn'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 Iseemed 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 Iconfess 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.
