Eugene Pickering | Page 7

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