 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
19. BOOK XIX.
THE CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES.
I.
In the lower old-fashioned part of the city, in a narrow street
—almost a lane—once filled with demure-looking dwellings, but
now chiefly with immense lofty warehouses of foreign importers;
and not far from the corner where the lane intersected
with a very considerable but contracted thoroughfare for merchants
and their clerks, and their carmen and porters; stood at
this period a rather singular and ancient edifice, a relic of the
more primitive time. The material was a grayish stone, rudely
cut and masoned into walls of surprising thickness and strength;
along two of which walls—the side ones—were distributed as
many rows of arched and stately windows. A capacious,
square, and wholly unornamented tower rose in front to twice
the height of the body of the church; three sides of this tower
were pierced with small and narrow apertures. Thus far, in its
external aspect, the building—now more than a century old,—
sufficiently attested for what purpose it had originally been
founded. In its rear, was a large and lofty plain brick structure,
with its front to the rearward street, but its back presented
to the back of the church, leaving a small, flagged, and quadrangular
vacancy between. At the sides of this quadrangle,
three stories of homely brick colonnades afforded covered communication
between the ancient church, and its less elderly
fencing in a small courtyard in front of the rearward building,
seemed to hint, that the latter had usurped an unoccupied space
formerly sacred as the old church's burial inclosure. Such a
fancy would have been entirely true. Built when that part of
the city was devoted to private residences, and not to warehouses
and offices as now, the old Church of the Apostles had
had its days of sanctification and grace; but the tide of change
and progress had rolled clean through its broad-aisle and side-aisles,
and swept by far the greater part of its congregation
two or three miles up town. Some stubborn and elderly old
merchants and accountants, lingered awhile among its dusty
pews, listening to the exhortations of a faithful old pastor, who,
sticking to his post in this flight of his congregation, still
propped his half-palsied form in the worm-eaten pulpit, and
occasionally pounded—though now with less vigorous hand—
the moth-eaten covering of its desk. But it came to pass, that
this good old clergyman died; and when the gray-headed and
bald-headed remaining merchants and accountants followed his
coffin out of the broad-aisle to see it reverently interred; then
that was the last time that ever the old edifice witnessed the
departure of a regular worshiping assembly from its walls.
The venerable merchants and accountants held a meeting, at
which it was finally decided, that, hard and unwelcome as the
necessity might be, yet it was now no use to disguise the fact,
that the building could no longer be efficiently devoted to its
primitive purpose. It must be divided into stores; cut into
offices; and given for a roost to the gregarious lawyers. This
intention was executed, even to the making offices high up in
the tower; and so well did the thing succeed, that ultimately
the church-yard was invaded for a supplemental edifice, likewise
to be promiscuously rented to the legal crowd. But this
new building very much exceeded the body of the church in
height. It was some seven stories; a fearful pile of Titanic
sacred tower.
In this ambitious erection the proprietors went a few steps, or
rather a few stories, too far. For as people would seldom willingly
fall into legal altercations unless the lawyers were always
very handy to help them; so it is ever an object with lawyers
to have their offices as convenient as feasible to the street; on
the ground-floor, if possible, without a single acclivity of a step;
but at any rate not in the seventh story of any house, where
their clients might be deterred from employing them at all, if
they were compelled to mount seven long flights of stairs, one
over the other, with very brief landings, in order even to pay
their preliminary retaining fees. So, from some time after its
throwing open, the upper stories of the less ancient attached
edifice remained almost wholly without occupants; and by the
forlorn echoes of their vacuities, right over the head of the
business-thriving legal gentlemen below, must—to some few of
them at least—have suggested unwelcome similitudes, having
reference to the crowded state of their basement-pockets, as
compared with the melancholy condition of their attics;—alas!
full purses and empty heads! This dreary posture of affairs,
however, was at last much altered for the better, by the gradual
filling up of the vacant chambers on high, by scores of
those miscellaneous, bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously
professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby
black, and unaccountable foreign-looking fellows in blue spectacles;
who, previously issuing from unknown parts of the
world, like storks in Holland, light on the eaves, and in the attics
of lofty old buildings in most large sea-port towns. Here
they sit and talk like magpies; or descending in quest of improbable
dinners, are to be seen drawn up along the curb in
front of the eating-houses, like lean rows of broken-hearted
pelicans on a beach; their pockets loose, hanging down and
flabby, like the pelican's pouches when fish are hard to be caught.
amends for their physical forlornness, by resolutely reveling in
the region of blissful ideals.
They are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors,
or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or
fugitive French politicians, or German philosophers. Their
mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very
fine and spiritual upon the whole; since the vacuity of their
exchequers leads them to reject the coarse materialism of Hobbs,
and incline to the airy exaltations of the Berkelyan philosophy.
Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can not but give in
to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of leisure in
their attics (physical and figurative), unite with the leisure in
their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that undivided
attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the
sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can't) is
the one great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives.
These are the glorious paupers, from whom I learn the profoundest
mysteries of things; since their very existence in the
midst of such a terrible precariousness of the commonest means
of support, affords a problem on which many speculative nutcrackers
have been vainly employed. Yet let me here offer up
three locks of my hair, to the memory of all such glorious paupers
who have lived and died in this world. Surely, and truly
I honor them—noble men often at bottom—and for that very
reason I make bold to be gamesome about them; for where
fundamental nobleness is, and fundamental honor is due, merriment
is never accounted irreverent. The fools and pretenders
of humanity, and the impostors and baboons among the gods,
these only are offended with raillery; since both those gods
and men whose titles to eminence are secure, seldom worry
themselves about the seditious gossip of old apple-women, and
the skylarkings of funny little boys in the street.
When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow.
that loftiness, even when converted to the meanest uses. It
would seem, as if forced by imperative Fate to renounce the
reality of the romantic and lofty, the people of the present
would fain make a compromise by retaining some purely
imaginative remainder. The curious effects of this tendency
is oftenest evinced in those venerable countries of the old
transatlantic world; where still over the Thames one bridge
yet retains the monastic title of Blackfriars; though not a
single Black Friar, but many a pickpocket, has stood on that
bank since a good ways beyond the days of Queen Bess;
where still innumerable other historic anomalies sweetly and
sadly remind the present man of the wonderful procession that
preceded him in his new generation. Nor—though the comparative
recentness of our own foundation upon these Columbian
shores, excludes any considerable participation in these
attractive anomalies,—yet are we not altogether, in our more
elderly towns, wholly without some touch of them, here and
there. It was thus with the ancient Church of the Apostles—
better known, even in its primitive day, under the abbreviative
of The Apostles—which, though now converted from its original
purpose to one so widely contrasting, yet still retained its
majestical name. The lawyer or artist tenanting its chambers,
whether in the new building or the old, when asked where he
was to be found, invariably replied,—At the Apostles'. But
because now, at last, in the course of the inevitable transplantations
of the more notable localities of the various professions
in a thriving and amplifying town, the venerable spot offered
not such inducements as before to the legal gentlemen; and as
the strange nondescript adventures and artists, and indigent
philosophers of all sorts, crowded in as fast as the others left;
therefore, in reference to the metaphysical strangeness of these
curious inhabitants, and owing in some sort to the circumstance,
that several of them were well-known Teleological
of all manner of heterodoxical tenets; therefore, I say, and
partly, peradventure, from some slight wagishness in the
public; the immemorial popular name of the ancient church
itself was participatingly transferred to the dwellers therein.
So it came to pass, that in the general fashion of the day, he
who had chambers in the old church was familiarly styled an
Apostle.
But as every effect is but the cause of another and a subsequent
one, so it now happened that finding themselves thus
clannishly, and not altogether infelicitously entitled, the occupants
of the venerable church began to come together out of
their various dens, in more social communion; attracted
toward each other by a title common to all. By-and-by, from
this, they went further; and insensibly, at last became organized
in a peculiar society, which, though exceedingly inconspicuous,
and hardly perceptible in its public demonstrations,
was still secretly suspected to have some mysterious ulterior
object, vaguely connected with the absolute overturning of
Church and State, and the hasty and premature advance of
some unknown great political and religious Millennium. Still,
though some zealous conservatives and devotees of morals,
several times left warning at the police-office, to keep a wary
eye on the old church; and though, indeed, sometimes an
officer would look up inquiringly at the suspicious narrow window-slits
in the lofty tower; yet, to say the truth, was the
place, to all appearance, a very quiet and decorous one, and
its occupants a company of harmless people, whose greatest reproach
was efflorescent coats and crack-crowned hats all
podding in the sun.
Though in the middle of the day many bales and boxes
would be trundled along the stores in front of the Apostles';
and along its critically narrow sidewalk, the merchants would
now and then hurry to meet their checks ere the banks should
purposes, and not used as a general thoroughfare, it was at
all times a rather secluded and silent place. But from an hour
or two before sundown to ten or eleven o'clock the next morning,
it was remarkably silent and depopulated, except by the
Apostles themselves; while every Sunday it presented an aspect
of surprising and startling quiescence; showing nothing
but one long vista of six or seven stories of inexorable iron shutters
on both sides of the way. It was pretty much the same
with the other street, which, as before said, intersected with the
warehousing lane, not very far from the Apostles'. For though
that street was indeed a different one from the latter, being full
of cheap refectories for clerks, foreign restaurants, and other
places of commercial resort; yet the only hum in it was restricted
to business hours; by night it was deserted of every
occupant but the lamp-posts; and on Sunday, to walk through
it, was like walking through an avenue of sphinxes.
Such, then, was the present condition of the ancient Church
of the Apostles; buzzing with a few lingering, equivocal lawyers
in the basement, and populous with all sorts of poets,
painters, paupers and philosophers above. A mysterious professor
of the flute was perched in one of the upper stories of the
tower; and often, of silent, moonlight nights, his lofty, melodious
notes would be warbled forth over the roofs of the ten thousand
warehouses around him—as of yore, the bell had pealed over
the domestic gables of a long-departed generation.
II.
On the third night following the arrival of the party in the
city, Pierre sat at twilight by a lofty window in the rear building
of the Apostles'. The chamber was meager even to meanness.
but a low, long, and very curious-looking single bedstead, that
might possibly serve for an indigent bachelor's pallet, a large,
blue, chintz-covered chest, a rickety, rheumatic, and most ancient
mahogany chair, and a wide board of the toughest live-oak,
about six feet long, laid upon two upright empty flour-barrels,
and loaded with a large bottle of ink, an unfastened
bundle of quills, a pen-knife, a folder, and a still unbound ream
of foolscap paper, significantly stamped, “Ruled; Blue.”
There, on the third night, at twilight, sat Pierre by that lofty
window of a beggarly room in the rear-building of the Apostles'.
He was entirely idle, apparently; there was nothing in
his hands; but there might have been something on his heart.
Now and then he fixedly gazes at the curious-looking, rusty
old bedstead. It seemed powerfully symbolical to him; and
most symbolical it was. For it was the ancient dismemberable
and portable camp-bedstead of his grandfather, the defiant defender
of the Fort, the valiant captain in many an unsuccumbing
campaign. On that very camp-bedstead, there, beneath
his tent on the field, the glorious old mild-eyed and warrior-hearted
general had slept, and but waked to buckle his knight-making
sword by his side; for it was noble knighthood to be
slain by grand Pierre; in the other world his foes' ghosts
bragged of the hand that had given them their passports.
But has that hard bed of War, descended for an inheritance
to the soft body of Peace? In the peaceful time of full barns,
and when the noise of the peaceful flail is abroad, and the hum
of peaceful commerce resounds, is the grandson of two Generals
a warrior too? Oh, not for naught, in the time of this seeming
peace, are warrior grandsires given to Pierre! For Pierre
is a warrior too; Life his campaign, and three fierce allies, Woe
and Scorn and Want, his foes. The wide world is banded
against him; for lo you! he holds up the standard of Right,
and swears by the Eternal and True! But ah, Pierre, Pierre,
thy most extended length measures not the proud six feet four
of thy grand John of Gaunt sire! The stature of the warrior
is cut down to the dwindled glory of the fight. For more glorious
in real tented field to strike down your valiant foe, than
in the conflicts of a noble soul with a dastardly world to chase
a vile enemy who ne'er will show front.
There, then, on the third night, at twilight, by the lofty window
of that beggarly room, sat Pierre in the rear building of
the Apostles'. He is gazing out from the window now. But
except the donjon form of the old gray tower, seemingly there
is nothing to see but a wilderness of tiles, slate, shingles, and
tin;—the desolate hanging wildernesses of tiles, slate, shingles
and tin, wherewith we modern Babylonians replace the fair
hanging-gardens of the fine old Asiatic times when the excellent
Nebuchadnezzar was king.
There he sits, a strange exotic, transplanted from the delectable
alcoves of the old manorial mansion, to take root in this
niggard soil. No more do the sweet purple airs of the hills
round about the green fields of Saddle Meadows come revivingly
wafted to his cheek. Like a flower he feels the change;
his bloom is gone from his cheek; his cheek is wilted and pale.
From the lofty window of that beggarly room, what is it that
Pierre is so intently eying? There is no street at his feet; like
a profound black gulf the open area of the quadrangle gapes
beneath him. But across it, and at the further end of the steep
roof of the ancient church, there looms the gray and grand old
tower; emblem to Pierre of an unshakable fortitude, which, deep-rooted
in the heart of the earth, defied all the howls of the air.
There is a door in Pierre's room opposite the window of
Pierre: and now a soft knock is heard in that direction, accompanied
by gentle words, asking whether the speaker might
enter.
“Yes, always, sweet Isabel”—answered Pierre, rising and
for a sofa; come, sit down now, my sister, and let us fancy
ourselves anywhere thou wilt.”
“Then, my brother, let us fancy ourselves in realms of everlasting
twilight and peace, where no bright sun shall rise, because
the black night is always its follower. Twilight and
peace, my brother, twilight and peace!”
“It is twilight now, my sister; and surely, this part of the
city at least seems still.”
“Twilight now, but night soon; then a brief sun, and then
another long night. Peace now, but sleep and nothingness
soon, and then hard work for thee, my brother, till the sweet
twilight come again.”
“Let us light a candle, my sister; the evening is deepning.”
“For what light a candle, dear Pierre?—Sit close to me, my
brother.”
He moved nearer to her, and stole one arm around her; her
sweet head leaned against his breast; each felt the other's
throbbing.
“Oh, my dear Pierre, why should we always be longing for
peace, and then be impatient of peace when it comes? Tell
me, my brother! Not two hours ago, thou wert wishing for
twilight, and now thou wantest a candle to hurry the twilight's
last lingering away.”
But Pierre did not seem to hear her; his arm embraced her
tighter; his whole frame was invisibly trembling. Then suddenly
in a low tone of wonderful intensity he breathed:
“Isabel! Isabel!”
She caught one arm around him, as his was around herself;
the tremor ran from him to her; both sat dumb.
He rose, and paced the room.
“Well, Pierre; thou camest in here to arrange thy matters,
thou saidst. Now what hast thou done? Come, we will light
a candle now.”
The candle was lighted, and their talk went on.
“How about the papers, my brother? Dost thou find
every thing right? Hast thou decided upon what to publish
first, while thou art writing the new thing thou didst hint of?”
“Look at that chest, my sister. Seest thou not that the
cords are yet untied?”
“Then thou hast not been into it at all as yet?”
“Not at all, Isabel. In ten days I have lived ten thousand
years. Forewarned now of the rubbish in that chest, I can
not summon the heart to open it. Trash! Dross! Dirt!”
“Pierre! Pierre! what change is this? Didst thou not tell
me, ere we came hither, that thy chest not only contained
some silver and gold, but likewise far more precious things,
readily convertible into silver and gold? Ah, Pierre, thou didst
swear we had naught to fear!”
“If I have ever willfully deceived thee, Isabel, may the high
gods prove Benedict Arnolds to me, and go over to the devils
to reinforce them against me! But to have ignorantly deceived
myself and thee together, Isabel; that is a very different
thing. Oh, what a vile juggler and cheat is man! Isabel, in
that chest are things which in the hour of composition, I
thought the very heavens looked in from the windows in astonishment
at their beauty and power. Then, afterward, when
days cooled me down, and again I took them up and scanned
them, some underlying suspicions intruded; but when in the
open air, I recalled the fresh, unwritten images of the bunglingly
written things; then I felt buoyant and triumphant
again; as if by that act of ideal recalling, I had, forsooth,
transferred the perfect ideal to the miserable written attempt at
embodying it. This mood remained. So that afterward how
I talked to thee about the wonderful things I had done; the
gold and the silver mine I had long before sprung for thee and
for me, who never were to come to want in body or mind. Yet
all this time, there was the latent suspicion of folly; but I would
ten thousand universal revealings brand me on the forehead with
fool! and like protested notes at the Bankers, all those written
things of mine, are jaggingly cut through and through with the
protesting hammer of Truth!—Oh, I am sick, sick, sick!”
“Let the arms that never were filled but by thee, lure thee
back again, Pierre, to the peace of the twilight, even though it
be of the dimmest!”
She blew out the light, and made Pierre sit down by her;
and their hands were placed in each other's.
“Say, are not thy torments now gone, my brother?”
“But replaced by—by—by—Oh God, Isabel, unhand me!”
cried Pierre, starting up. “Ye heavens, that have hidden
yourselves in the black hood of the night, I call to ye! If to follow
Virtue to her uttermost vista, where common souls never
go; if by that I take hold on hell, and the uttermost virtue,
after all, prove but a betraying pander to the monstrousest
vice,—then close in and crush me, ye stony walls, and into one
gulf let all things tumble together!”
“My brother! this is some incomprehensible raving,” pealed
Isabel, throwing both arms around him;—“my brother, my
brother!”
“Hark thee to thy furthest inland soul”—thrilled Pierre in
a steeled and quivering voice. “Call me brother no more!
How knowest thou I am thy brother? Did thy mother tell
thee? Did my father say so to me?—I am Pierre, and thou
Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common humanity,—no
more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own combustibles.
If they have put powder-casks in me—let them look
to it! let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and
seem to half-see, somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral
perfection in man is wide of the mark. The demigods trample
on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash! Isabel, I will write
such things—I will gospelize the world anew, and show them
write it!”
“Pierre, I am a poor girl, born in the midst of a mystery,
bred in mystery, and still surviving to mystery. So
mysterious myself, the air and the earth are unutterable to
me; no word have I to express them. But these are the circumambient
mysteries; thy words, thy thoughts, open other
wonder-worlds to me, whither by myself I might fear to go.
But trust to me, Pierre. With thee, with thee, I would boldly
swim a starless sea, and be buoy to thee, there, when thou
the strong swimmer shouldst faint. Thou, Pierre, speakest
of Virtue and Vice; life-secluded Isabel knows neither the
one nor the other, but by hearsay. What are they, in their
real selves, Pierre? Tell me first what is Virtue:—begin!”
“If on that point the gods are dumb, shall a pigmy speak?
Ask the air!”
“Then Virtue is nothing.”
“Not that!”
“Then Vice?”
“Look: a nothing is the substance, it casts one shadow one
way, and another the other way; and these two shadows cast
from one nothing; these, seems to me, are Virtue and Vice.”
“Then why torment thyself so, dearest Pierre?”
“It is the law.”
“What?”
“That a nothing should torment a nothing; for I am a nothing.
It is all a dream—we dream that we dreamed we dream.”
“Pierre, when thou just hovered on the verge, thou wert a
riddle to me; but now, that thou art deep down in the gulf of
the soul,—now, when thou wouldst be lunatic to wise men,
perhaps—now doth poor ignorant Isabel begin to comprehend
thee. Thy feeling hath long been mine, Pierre. Long loneliness
and anguish have opened miracles to me. Yes, it is all
a dream!”
Swiftly he caught her in his arms:—“From nothing proceeds
nothing, Isabel! How can one sin in a dream?”
“First what is sin, Pierre?”
“Another name for the other name, Isabel.”
“For Virtue, Pierre?”
“No, for Vice.”
“Let us sit down again, my brother.”
“I am Pierre.”
“Let us sit down again, Pierre; sit close; thy arm!”
And so, on the third night, when the twilight was gone, and
no lamp was lit, within the lofty window of that beggarly room,
sat Pierre and Isabel hushed.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |