 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
VIII.
The issue of these reconsiderings was the conviction, that
all he could now reasonably anticipate from Isabel, in further
disclosure on the subject of her life, were some few additional
particulars bringing it down to the present moment; and, also,
possibly filling out the latter portion of what she had already
revealed to him. Nor here, could he persuade himself, that
she would have much to say. Isabel had not been so digressive
and withholding as he had thought. What more, indeed,
could she now have to impart, except by what strange means
she had at last come to find her brother out; and the dreary
recital of how she had pecuniarily wrestled with her destitute
condition; how she had come to leave one place of toiling
refuge for another, till now he found her in humble servitude
at farmer Ulver's? Is it possible then, thought Pierre, that
there lives a human creature in this common world of every-days,
whose whole history may be told in little less than two-score
words, and yet embody in that smallness a fathomless
fountain of ever-welling mystery? Is it possible, after all, that
spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is
brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our
garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars
themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
The intuitively certain, however literally unproven fact of
Isabel's sisterhood to him, was a link that he now felt binding
him to a before unimagined and endless chain of wondering.
His very blood seemed to flow through all his arteries with
unwonted subtileness, when he thought that the same tide
flowed through the mystic veins of Isabel. All his occasional
pangs of dubiousness as to the grand governing thing of all—
the reality of the physical relationship—only recoiled back upon
him with added tribute of both certainty and insolubleness.
She is my sister—my own father's daughter. Well; why
do I believe it? The other day I had not so much as heard
the remotest rumor of her existence; and what has since occurred
to change me? What so new and incontestable vouchers
have I handled? None at all. But I have seen her. Well;
grant it; I might have seen a thousand other girls, whom I
had never seen before; but for that, I would not own any one
among them for my sister. But the portrait, the chair-portrait,
Pierre? Think of that. But that was painted before Isabel
was born; what can that portrait have to do with Isabel? It
is not the portrait of Isabel, it is my father's portrait; and yet
my mother swears it is not he.
Now alive as he was to all these searching argumentative
itemizings of the minutest known facts any way bearing upon
the subject; and yet, at the same time, persuaded, strong as
death, that in spite of them, Isabel was indeed his sister; how
could Pierre, naturally poetic, and therefore piercing as he
was; how could he fail to acknowledge the existence of that
all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness, which, when
imperfectly and isolatedly recognized by the generality, is so
significantly denominated The Finger of God? But it is not
merely the Finger, it is the whole outspread Hand of God;
for doth not Scripture intimate, that He holdeth all of us in
the hollow of His hand?—a Hollow, truly!
Still wandering through the forest, his eye pursuing its evershifting
shadowy vistas; remote from all visible haunts and
traces of that strangely wilful race, who, in the sordid traffickings
of clay and mud, are ever seeking to denationalize the natural
heavenliness of their souls; there came into the mind of
Pierre, thughts and fancies never imbibed within the gates of
towns; but only given forth by the atmosphere of primeval
forests, which, with the eternal ocean, are the only unchanged
general objects remaining to this day, from those that originally
met the gaze of Adam. For so it is, that the apparently most
are, in this view, immensely the most endurable.
Now all his ponderings, however excursive, wheeled round
Isabel as their center; and back to her they came again from
every excursion; and again derived some new, small germs for
wonderment.
The question of Time occurred to Pierre. How old was Isabel?
According to all reasonable inferences from the presumed
circumstnaces of her life, she was his elder, certainly, though by
uncertain years; yet her whole aspect was that of more than
childlikeness; nevertheless, not only did he feel his muscular
superiority to her, so to speak, which made him spontaneously
alive to a feeling of elderly protectingness over her; not only
did he experience the thoughts of superior world-acquaintance,
and general cultured knowledge; but spite of reason's self, and
irrespective of all mere computings, he was conscious of a feeling
which independently pronounced him her senior in point of
Time, and Isabel a child of everlasting youngness. This strange,
though strong conceit of his mysterious persuasion, doubtless,
had its untraced, and but little-suspected origin in his mind,
from ideas born of his devout meditations upon the artless infantileness
of her face; which, though profoundly mournful in
the general expression, yet did not, by any means, for that cause,
lose one whit in its singular infantileness; as the faces of real
infants, in their earliest visibleness, do oft-times wear a look of
deep and endless sadness. But it was not the sadness, nor indeed,
strictly speaking, the infantileness of the face of Isabel
which so singularly impressed him with the idea of her original
and changeless youthfulness. It was something else; yet something
which entirely eluded him.
Imaginatively exalted by the willing suffrages of all mankind
into higher and purer realms than men themselves inhabit;
beautiful women—those of them at least who are beautiful in
soul as well as body—do, notwithstanding the relentless law of
exempt from the incantations of decay; for as the outward
loveliness touch by touch departs, the interior beauty touch by
touch replaces that departing bloom, with charms, which, underivable
from earth, possess the ineffaceableness of stars. Else,
why at the age of sixty, have some women held in the strongest
bonds of love and fealty, men young enough to be their
grandsons? And why did all-seducing Ninon unintendingly
break scores of hearts at seventy? It is because of the perennialness
of womanly sweetness.
Out from the infantile, yet eternal mournfulness of the face
of Isabel, there looked on Pierre that angelic childlikeness,
which our Savior hints is the one only investiture of translated
souls; for of such—even of little children—is the other world.
Now, unending as the wonderful rivers, which once bathed
the feet of the primeval generations, and still remain to flow
fast by the graves of all succeeding men, and by the beds of
all now living; unending, ever-flowing, ran through the soul
of Pierre, fresh and fresher, further and still further, thoughts
of Isabel. But the more his thoughtful river ran, the more
mysteriousness it floated to him; and yet the more certainty
that the mysteriousness was unchangeable. In her life there
was an unraveled plot; and he felt that unraveled it would
eternally remain to him. No slightest hope or dream had he,
that what was dark and mournful in her would ever be cleared
up into some coming atmosphere of light and mirth. Like all
youths, Pierre had conned his novel-lessons; had read more
novels than most persons of his years; but their false, inverted
attempts at systematizing eternally unsystemizable elements;
their audacious, intermeddling impotency, in trying to unravel,
and spread out, and classify, the more thin than gossamer
threads which make up the complex web of life; these things
over Pierre had no power now. Straight through their helpless
miserableness he pierced; the one sensational truth in him.
that human life doth truly come from that, which all men are
agreed to call by the name of God; and that it partakes of the
unravelable inscrutableness of God. By infallible presentiment
he saw, that not always doth life's beginning gloom conclude
in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last
scene of life's fifth act; that while the countless tribes of common
novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently
clear them up at last; and while the countless tribe of
common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder
emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that
can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel
their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect,
unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated
stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides
of time and fate.
So Pierre renounced all thought of ever having Isabel's dark-lantern
illuminated to him. Her light was lidded, and the lid
was locked. Nor did he feel a pang at this. By posting
hither and thither among the reminiscences of his family, and
craftily interrogating his remaining relatives on his father's side,
he might possibly rake forth some few small grains of dubious
and most unsatisfying things, which, were he that way strongly
bent, would only serve the more hopelessly to cripple him in
his practical resolves. He determined to pry not at all into
this sacred problem. For him now the mystery of Isabel possessed
all the bewitchingness of the mysterious vault of night,
whose very darkness evokes the witchery.
The thoughtful river still ran on in him, and now it floated
still another thing to him.
Though the letter of Isabel gushed with all a sister's sacred
longings to embrace her brother, and in the most abandoned
terms painted the anguish of her life-long estrangement from
him; and though, in effect, it took vows to this,—that without
fit to be thrown into the nearest unfathomed pool, or rushing
stream; yet when the brother and the sister had encountered,
according to the set appointment, none of these impassionedments
had been repeated. She had more than thrice thanked
God, and most earnestly blessed himself, that now he had come
near to her in her loneliness; but no gesture of common and
customary sisterly affection. Nay, from his embrace had she
not struggled? nor kissed him once; nor had he kissed her,
except when the salute was solely sought by him.
Now Pierre began to see mysteries interpierced with mysteries,
and mysteries eluding mysteries; and began to seem to
see the mere imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle
of human association. Fate had done this thing for them.
Fate had separated the brother and the sister, till to each other
they somehow seemed so not at all. Sisters shrink not from
their brother's kisses. And Pierre felt that never, never would
he be able to embrace Isabel with the mere brotherly embrace;
while the thought of any other caress, which took hold of any
domesticness, was entirely vacant from his uncontaminated soul,
for it had never consciously intruded there.
Therefore, forever unsistered for him by the stroke of Fate,
and apparently forever, and twice removed from the remotest
possibility of that love which had drawn him to his Lucy; yet
still the object of the ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul;
therefore, to him, Isabel wholly soared out of the realms of mortalness,
and for him became transfigured in the highest heaven
of uncorrupted Love.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |