 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
21. BOOK XXI.
PIERE IMMATURELY ATTEMPTS A MATURE WORK.
TIDINGS FROM THE MEADOWS. PLINLIMMON.
I.
We are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three
lofty adjoining chambers of the Apostles. And passing on a
little further in time, and overlooking the hundred and one
domestic details, of how their internal arrangements were
finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly, now
giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter
occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel,
the only practical relief from the memories of her miserable
past; how Isabel herself in the otherwise occupied hours of
Pierre, passed some of her time in mastering the chirographical
incoherencies of his manuscripts, with a view to eventually
copying them out in a legible hand for the printer; or went
below stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in the modest
and amiable society of the three young ladies and their excellent
mother, found some little solace for the absence of
Pierre; or, when his day's work was done, sat by him in the
twilight, and played her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter
after chapter born of its wondrous suggestiveness; but alas!
eternally incapable of being translated into words; for where
the deepest words end, there music begins with its supersensuous
and all-confounding intimations.
Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning
in scorn even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, which,
written at Saddle Meadows in the sweet legendary time of
Lucy and her love, he had jealously kept from the publishers,
as too true and good to be published; renouncing all his foregone
self, Pierre was now engaged in a comprehensive compacted
work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous
motives unitedly impelled;—the burning desire to deliver what
he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to
the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely
penniless, unless by the sale of his book, he could realize
money. Swayed to universality of thought by the widely-explosive
mental tendencies of the profound events which had
lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which
he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that
most grand productions of the best human intellects ever are
built round a circle, as atolls (i. e. the primitive coral islets
which, raising themselves in the depths of profoundest seas, rise
funnel-like to the surface, and present there a hoop of white
rock, which though on the outside everywhere lashed by the
ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet lagoon within),
digestively including the whole range of all that can be known
or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book,
which the world should hail with surprise and delight. A
varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly
acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course
of the multifarious, incidental, bibliographic encounterings of
almost any civilized young inquirer after Truth; this poured
one considerable contributary stream into that bottomless
spring of original thought which the occasion and time had
caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself
upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in
reality to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of
absolute Truth, all mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle
him along.
While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted
into a new and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he
was, in fact, but in one of the stages of the transition. That
ultimate element once fairly gained, then books no more are
needed for buoys to our souls; our own strong limbs support
us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a jeering impunity.
He did not see,—or if he did, he could not yet name
the true cause for it,—that already, in the incipiency of his
work, the heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge
would not congenially weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal
airiness of spontaneous creative thought. He would climb
Parnassus with a pile of folios on his back. He did not see,
that it was nothing at all to him, what other men had written;
that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in
himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him
(Pierre), so long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something
transcendently great. He did not see that there is no
such thing as a standard for the creative spirit; that no one
great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to
domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind;
but that all existing great works must be federated in the
fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic
whole; and then,—without at all dictating to his own mind,
or unduly biasing it any way,—thus combined, they would
prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him. He did
not see, that even when thus combined, all was but one small
mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and inexhaustibility
in himself; that all the great books in the world are but the
mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied
images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors,
distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind
look at the object itself, and not at its reflection.
But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do
never in one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously
reveal their full awfulness of amplitude—their overawing extent
of peak crowded on peak, and spur sloping on spur, and
chain jammed behind chain, and all their wonderful battalionings
of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that on first
entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at once
perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such
an encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost
snows. Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God,
does man come at last to gain his Mont Blanc and take an
overtopping view of these Alps; and even then, the tithe is
not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the Rocky
Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the
soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material
spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once
feel himself fairly afloat in himself!
But not now to consider these ulterior things, Pierre, though
strangely and very newly alive to many before unregarded
wonders in the general world; still, had he not as yet procured
for himself that enchanter's wand of the soul, which but touching
the humblest experiences in one's life, straightway it starts
up all eyes, in every one of which are endless significancies.
Not yet had he dropped his angle into the well of his childhood,
to find what fish might be there; for who dreams to find
fish in a well? the running stream of the outer world, there
doubtless swim the golden perch and the pickerel! Ten million
things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy
lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this
Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to
see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens
he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any
of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis,
the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By
vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we
come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus;
but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant
as vast is the soul of a man!
II.
He had been engaged some weeks upon his book—in pursuance
of his settled plan avoiding all contact with any of his
city-connections or friends, even as in his social downfall they
sedulously avoided seeking him out—nor ever once going or
sending to the post-office, though it was but a little round the
corner from where he was, since having dispatched no letters
himself, he expected none; thus isolated from the world, and
intent upon his literary enterprise, Pierre had passed some
weeks, when verbal tidings came to him, of three most momentous
events.
First: his mother was dead.
Second: all Saddle Meadows was become Glen Stanly's.
Third: Glen Stanly was believed to be the suitor of Lucy;
who, convalescent from an almost mortal illness, was now
dwelling at her mother's house in town.
It was chiefly the first-mentioned of these events which darted
a sharp natural anguish into Pierre. No letter had come to
him; no smallest ring or memorial been sent him; no slightest
mention made of him in the will; and yet it was reported that
an inconsolable grief had induced his mother's mortal malady,
and driven her at length into insanity, which suddenly terminated
been cold in the ground for twenty-five days.
How plainly did all this speak of the equally immense pride
and grief of his once magnificent mother; and how agonizedly
now did it hint of her mortally-wounded love for her only and
best-beloved Pierre! In vain he reasoned with himself; in
vain remonstrated with himself; in vain sought to parade all
his stoic arguments to drive off the onslaught of natural passion.
Nature prevailed; and with tears that like acid burned
and scorched as they flowed, he wept, he raved, at the bitter
loss of his parent; whose eyes had been closed by unrelated
hands that were hired; but whose heart had been broken, and
whose very reason been ruined, by the related hands of her
son.
For some interval it almost seemed as if his own heart would
snap; his own reason go down. Unendurable grief of a man,
when Death itself gives the stab, and then snatches all availments
to solacement away. For in the grave is no help, no
prayer thither may go, no forgiveness thence come; so that the
penitent whose sad victim lies in the ground, for that useless
penitent his doom is eternal, and though it be Christmas-day
with all Christendom, with him it is Hell-day and an eaten
liver forever.
With what marvelous precision and exactitude he now went
over in his mind all the minutest details of his old joyous life
with his mother at Saddle Meadows. He began with his own
toilet in the morning; then his mild stroll into the fields;
then his cheerful return to call his mother in her chamber; then
the gay breakfast—and so on, and on, all through the sweet
day, till mother and son kissed, and with light, loving hearts
separated to their beds, to prepare themselves for still another
day of affectionate delight. This recalling of innocence and
joy in the hour of remorsefulness and woe; this is as heating
red-hot the pincers that tear us. But in this delirium of his
the natural grief for the loss of a parent from that other
one which was born of compunction. He strove hard to define
it, but could not. He tried to cozen himself into believing
that all his grief was but natural, or if there existed any
other, that must spring—not from the consciousness of having
done any possible wrong—but from the pang at what terrible
cost the more exalted virtues are gained. Nor did he wholly
fail in this endeavor. At last he dismissed his mother's memory
into that same profound vault where hitherto had reposed
the swooned form of his Lucy. But, as sometimes men are
coffined in a trance, being thereby mistaken for dead; so it is
possible to bury a tranced grief in the soul, erroneously supposing
that it hath no more vitality of suffering. Now, immortal
things only can beget immortality. It would almost seem one
presumptive argument for the endless duration of the human
soul, that it is impossible in time and space to kill any compunction
arising from having cruelly injured a departed fellow-being.
Ere he finally committed his mother to the profoundest vault
of his soul, fain would he have drawn one poor alleviation from
a circumstance, which nevertheless, impartially viewed, seemed
equally capable either of soothing or intensifying his grief.
His mother's will, which without the least mention of his own
name, bequeathed several legacies to her friends, and concluded
by leaving all Saddle Meadows and its rent-rolls to Glendinning
Stanly; this will bore the date of the day immediately succeeding
his fatal announcement on the landing of the stairs, of his
assumed nuptials with Isabel. It plausibly pressed upon him,
that as all the evidences of his mother's dying unrelentingness
toward him were negative; and the only positive evidence—so
to speak—of even that negativeness, was the will which omitted
all mention of Pierre; therefore, as that will bore so significant
a date, it must needs be most reasonable to conclude,
mother's first indignation. But small consolation was this,
when he considered the final insanity of his mother; for whence
that insanity but from a hate-grief unrelenting, even as his
father must have become insane from a sin-grief irreparable?
Nor did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail
to impress his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate
—his own hereditary liability to madness. Presentiment, I
say; but what is a presentiment? how shall you coherently
define a presentiment, or how make any thing out of it which
is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is but a judgment
in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet possessing
this preternaturalness of prophecy, how then shall you
escape the fateful conclusion, that you are helplessly held in the
six hands of the Sisters? For while still dreading your doom,
you foreknow it. Yet how foreknow and dread in one breath,
unless with this divine seeming power of prescience, you blend
the actual slimy powerlessness of defense?
That his cousin, Glen Stanly, had been chosen by his mother
to inherit the domain of the Meadows, was not entirely surprising
to Pierre. Not only had Glen always been a favorite with
his mother by reason of his superb person and his congeniality
of worldly views with herself, but excepting only Pierre, he was
her nearest surviving blood relation; and moreover, in his christian
name, bore the hereditary syllables, Glendinning. So that
if to any one but Pierre the Meadows must descend, Glen, on
these general grounds, seemed the appropriate heir.
But it is not natural for a man, never mind who he may be,
to see a noble patrimony, rightfully his, go over to a soul-alien,
and that alien once his rival in love, and now his heartless,
sneering foe; for so Pierre could not but now argue of Glen;
it is not natural for a man to see this without singular emotions
of discomfort and hate. Nor in Pierre were these feelings at
all soothed by the report of Glen's renewed attentions to Lucy.
at bottom takes offense at the attentions of any other man offered
to a woman, the hope of whose nuptial love he himself
may have discarded. Fain would a man selfishly appropriate
all the hearts which have ever in any way confessed themselves
his. Besides, in Pierre's case, this resentment was heightened
by Glen's previous hypocritical demeanor. For now all his suspicions
seemed abundantly verified; and comparing all dates,
he inferred that Glen's visit to Europe had only been undertaken
to wear off the pang of his rejection by Lucy, a rejection tacitly
consequent upon her not denying her affianced relation to
Pierre.
But now, under the mask of profound sympathy—in time,
ripening into love—for a most beautiful girl, ruffianly deserted
by her betrothed, Glen could afford to be entirely open in his new
suit, without at all exposing his old scar to the world. So at
least it now seemed to Pierre. Moreover, Glen could now approach
Lucy under the most favorable possible auspices. He
could approach her as a deeply sympathizing friend, all wishful
to assuage her sorrow, but hinting nothing, at present, of any
selfish matrimonial intent; by enacting this prudent and unclamorous
part, the mere sight of such tranquil, disinterested,
but indestructible devotedness, could not but suggest in Lucy's
mind, very natural comparisons between Glen and Pierre, most
deplorably abasing to the latter. Then, no woman—as it would
sometimes seem—no woman is utterly free from the influence
of a princely social position in her suitor, especially if he be
handsome and young. And Glen would come to her now the
master of two immense fortunes, and the heir, by voluntary
election, no less than by blood propinquity, to the ancestral bannered
hall, and the broad manorial meadows of the Glendinnings.
And thus, too, the spirit of Pierre's own mother would
seem to press Glen's suit. Indeed, situated now as he was
Glen would seem all the finest part of Pierre, without any of
had once been to Lucy. And as in the case of a man who has
lost a sweet wife, and who long refuses the least consolation;
as this man at last finds a singular solace in the companionship
of his wife's sister, who happens to bear a peculiar family resemblance
to the dead; and as he, in the end, proposes marriage
to this sister, merely from the force of such magical associative
influences; so it did not seem wholly out of reason to
suppose, that the great manly beauty of Glen, possessing a
strong related similitude to Pierre's, might raise in Lucy's heart
associations, which would lead her at least to seek—if she could
not find—solace for one now regarded as dead and gone to her
forever, in the devotedness of another, who would notwithstanding
almost seem as that dead one brought back to life.
Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we
would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is
as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and
where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of
the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.
As Pierre conjured up this phantom of Glen transformed
into the seeming semblance of himself; as he figured it advancing
toward Lucy and raising her hand in devotion; an infinite
quenchless rage and malice possessed him. Many commingled
emotions combined to provoke this storm. But chief
of all was something strangely akin to that indefinable detestation
which one feels for any impostor who has dared to assume
one's own name and aspect in any equivocal or dishonorable
affair; an emotion greatly intensified if this impostor be known
for a mean villain at bottom, and also, by the freak of nature
to be almost the personal duplicate of the man whose identity
he assumes. All these and a host of other distressful and resentful
fancies now ran through the breast of Pierre. All his
Faith-born, enthusiastic, high-wrought, stoic, and philosophic
defenses, were now beaten down by this sudden storm of nature
philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will
stand the final test of a real impassioned onset of Life and
Passion upon him. Then all the fair philosophic or Faith-phantoms
that he raised from the mist, slide away and disappear
as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air,
but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophizings, Life
breaks upon a man like a morning.
While this mood was on him, Pierre cursed himself for a
heartless villain and an idiot fool;—heartless villain, as the murderer
of his mother—idiot fool, because he had thrown away
all his felicity; because he had himself, as it were, resigned his
noble birthright to a cunning kinsman for a mess of pottage,
which now proved all but ashes in his mouth.
Resolved to hide these new, and—as it latently seemed to him
—unworthy pangs, from Isabel, as also their cause, he quitted
his chamber, intending a long vagabond stroll in the suburbs
of the town, to wear off his sharper grief, ere he should again
return into her sight.
III.
As Pierre, now hurrying from his chamber, was rapidly
passing through one of the higher brick colonnades connecting
the ancient building with the modern, there advanced toward
him from the direction of the latter, a very plain, composed,
manly figure, with a countenance rather pale if any thing, but
quite clear and without wrinkle. Though the brow and the
beard, and the steadiness of the head and settledness of the
step indicated mature age, yet the blue, bright, but still quiescent
eye offered a very striking contrast. In that eye, the gay
immortal youth Apollo, seemed enshrined; while on that ivory-throned
of this man, the whole air and look of this man, expressed
a cheerful content. Cheerful is the adjective, for it
was the contrary of gloom; content—perhaps acquiescence—
is the substantive, for it was not Happiness or Delight. But
while the personal look and air of this man were thus winning,
there was still something latently visible in him which repelled.
That something may best be characterized as non-Benevolence.
Non-Benevolence seems the best word, for it was neither Malice
nor Ill-will; but something passive. To crown all, a certain
floating atmosphere seemed to invest and go along with this
man. That atmosphere seems only renderable in words by
the term Inscrutableness. Though the clothes worn by this
man were strictly in accordance with the general style of any
unobtrusive gentleman's dress, yet his clothes seemed to disguise
this man. One would almost have said, his very face,
the apparently natural glance of his very eye disguised this
man.
Now, as this person deliberately passed by Pierre, he lifted
his hat, gracefully bowed, smiled gently, and passed on. But
Pierre was all confusion; he flushed, looked askance, stammered
with his hand at his hat to return the courtesy of the
other; he seemed thoroughly upset by the mere sight of this
hat-lifting, gracefully bowing, gently-smiling, and most miraculously
self-possessed, non-benevolent man.
Now who was this man? This man was Plotinus Plinlimmon.
Pierre had read a treatise of his in a stage-coach coming
to the city, and had heard him often spoken of by Millthorpe
and others as the Grand Master of a certain mystic Society
among the Apostles. Whence he came, no one could tell. His
surname was Welsh, but he was a Tennesseean by birth. He
seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort. He never
was known to work with his hands; never to write with his
hands (he would not even write a letter); he never was known
some day or other he must have read books, but that
time seemed gone now; as for the sleazy works that went under
his name, they were nothing more than his verbal things, taken
down at random, and bunglingly methodized by his young
disciples.
Finding Plinlimmon thus unfurnished either with books or pen
and paper, and imputing it to something like indigence, a foreign
scholar, a rich nobleman, who chanced to meet him once, sent
him a fine supply of stationery, with a very fine set of volumes,
—Cardan, Epictetus, the Book of Mormon, Abraham Tucker,
Condorcet and the Zenda-Vesta. But this noble foreign scholar
calling next day—perhaps in expectation of some compliment
for his great kindness—started aghast at his own package deposited
just without the door of Plinlimmon, and with all fastenings
untouched.
“Missent,” said Plotinus Plinlimmon placidly: “if any thing,
I looked for some choice Curaçoa from a nobleman like you. I
should be very happy, my dear Count, to accept a few jugs of
choice Curaçoa.”
“I thought that the society of which you are the head, excluded
all things of that sort”—replied the Count.
“Dear Count, so they do; but Mohammed hath his own dispensation.”
“Ah! I see,” said the noble scholar archly.
“I am afraid you do not see, dear Count”—said Plinlimmon;
and instantly before the eyes of the Count, the inscrutable atmosphere
eddied and eddied roundabout this Plotinus Plinlimmon.
His chance brushing encounter in the corridor was the first
time that ever Pierre had without medium beheld the form or
the face of Plinlimmon. Very early after taking chambers at
the Apostles', he had been struck by a steady observant blue-eyed
countenance at one of the loftiest windows of the old gray
rose prominently before his own chamber. Only through two
panes of glass—his own and the stranger's—had Pierre hitherto
beheld that remarkable face of repose,—repose neither divine
nor human, nor any thing made up of either or both—but a
repose separate and apart—a repose of a face by itself. One
adequate look at that face conveyed to most philosophical observers
a notion of something not before included in their
scheme of the Universe.
Now as to the mild sun, glass is no hindrance at all, but
he transmits his light and life through the glass; even so through
Pierre's panes did the tower face transmit its strange mystery.
Becoming more and more interested in this face, he had
questioned Millthorpe concerning it “Bless your soul”—replied
Millthorpe—“that is Plotinus Plinlimmon! our Grand
Master, Plotinus Plinlimmon! By gad, you must know Plotinus
thoroughly, as I have long done. Come away with me,
now, and let me introduce you instanter to Plotinus Plinlimmon.”
But Pierre declined; and could not help thinking, that though
in all human probability Plotinus well understood Millthorpe,
yet Millthorpe could hardly yet have wound himself into Plotinus;—though
indeed Plotinus—who at times was capable of
assuming a very off-hand, confidential, and simple, sophomorean
air—might, for reasons best known to himself, have tacitly pretended
to Millthorpe, that he (Millthorpe) had thoroughly
wriggled himself into his (Plotinus') innermost soul.
A man will be given a book, and when the donor's back is
turned, will carelessly drop it in the first corner; he is not overanxious
to be bothered with the book. But now personally
point out to him the author, and ten to one he goes back to
the corner, picks up the book, dusts the cover, and very carefully
reads that invaluable work. One does not vitally believe
in a man till one's own two eyes have beheld him. If then, by
had formerly been drawn into an attentive perusal of the work
on “Chronometricals and Horologicals;” how then was his
original interest heightened by catching a subsequent glimpse
of the author. But at the first reading, not being able—as he
thought—to master the pivot-idea of the pamphlet; and as
every incomprehended idea is not only a perplexity but a taunting
reproach to one's mind, Pierre had at last ceased studying
it altogether; nor consciously troubled himself further about it
during the remainder of the journey. But still thinking now it
might possibly have been mechanically retained by him, he
searched all the pockets of his clothes, but without success. He
begged Millthrope to do his best toward procuring him another
copy; but it proved impossible to find one. Plotinus himself
could not furnish it.
Among other efforts, Pierre in person had accosted a limping
half-deaf old book-stall man, not very far from the Apostles'.
“Have you the `Chronometrics,' my friend?” forgetting the
exact title.
“Very bad, very bad!” said the old man, rubbing his back;
—“has had the chronic-rheumatics ever so long; what's good
for 'em?”
Perceiving his mistake, Pierre replied that he did not know
what was the infallible remedy.
“Whist! let me tell ye, then, young 'un,” said the old cripple,
limping close up to him, and putting his mouth in Pierre's
ear—“Never catch 'em!—now's the time, while you 're young:
—never catch 'em!”
By-and-by the blue-eyed, mystic-mild face in the upper window
of the old gray tower began to domineer in a very remarkable
manner upon Pierre. When in his moods of peculiar
depression and despair; when dark thoughts of his miserable
condition would steal over him; and black doubts as to the in
tegrity of his unprecedented course in life would most malignantly
deep book would glidingly intrude; if glancing at his closet-window
that mystic-mild face met Pierre's; under any of these
influences the effect was surprising, and not to be adequately
detailed in any possible words.
Vain! vain! vain! said the face to him. Fool! fool! fool!
said the face to him. Quit! quit! quit! said the face to him.
But when he mentally interrogated the face as to why it thrice
said Vain! Fool! Quit! to him; here there was no response.
For that face did not respond to any thing. Did I not say before
that that face was something separate, and apart; a face
by itself? Now, any thing which is thus a thing by itself never
responds to any other. If to affirm, be to expand one's
isolated self; and if to deny, be to contract one's isolated self;
then to respond is a suspension of all isolation. Though this
face in the tower was so clear and so mild; though the gay
youth Apollo was enshrined in that eye, and paternal old Saturn
sat cross-legged on that ivory brow; yet somehow to Pierre the
face at last wore a sort of malicious leer to him. But the
Kantists might say, that this was a subjective sort of leer in
Pierre. Any way, the face seemed to leer upon Pierre. And
now it said to him—Ass! ass! ass! This expression was insufferable.
He procured some muslin for his closet-window;
and the face became curtained like any portrait. But this did
not mend the leer. Pierre knew that still the face leered behind
the muslin. What was most terrible was the idea that by
some magical means or other the face had got hold of his secret.
“Ay,” shuddered Pierre, “the face knows that Isabel is
not my wife! And that seems the reason it leers.”
Then would all manner of wild fancyings float through his
soul, and detached sentences of the “Chronometrics” would
vividly recur to him—sentences before but imperfectly comprehended,
but now shedding a strange, baleful light upon his
peculiar condition, and emphatically denouncing it. Again he
commentary of the mystic-mild face; again he searched
through the pockets of his clothes for the stage-coach copy, but
in vain.
And when—at the critical moment of quitting his chambers
that morning of the receipt of the fatal tidings—the face itself
—the man himself—this inscrutable Plotinus Plinlimmon himself—did
visibly brush by him in the brick corridor, and all the
trepidation he had ever before felt at the mild-mystic aspect in
the tower window, now redoubled upon him, so that, as before
said, he flushed, looked askance, and stammered with his saluting
hand to his hat;—then anew did there burn in him the
desire of procuring the pamphlet. “Cursed fate that I should
have lost it”—he cried;—“more cursed, that when I did have
it, and did read it, I was such a ninny as not to comprehend;
and now it is all too late!”
Yet—to anticipate here—when years after, an old Jew
Clothesman rummaged over a surtout of Pierre's—which by
some means had come into his hands—his lynx-like fingers
happened to feel something foreign between the cloth and the
heavy quilted bombazine lining. He ripped open the skirt,
and found several old pamphlet pages, soft and worn almost
to tissue, but still legible enough to reveal the title—“Chronometricals
and Horologicals.” Pierre must have ignorantly
thrust it into his pocket, in the stage, and it had worked
through a rent there, and worked its way clean down into the
skirt, and there helped pad the padding. So that all the time
he was hunting for this pamphlet, he himself was wearing the
pamphlet. When he brushed past Plinlimmon in the brick
corridor, and felt that renewed intense longing for the pamphlet,
then his right hand was not two inches from the pamphlet.
Possibly this curious circumstance may in some sort illustrate
his self-supposed non-understanding of the pamphlet, as
about with him in his mind the thorough understanding of the
book, and yet not be aware that he so understood it? I think
that—regarded in one light—the final career of Pierre will
seem to show, that he did understand it. And here it may be
randomly suggested, by way of bagatelle, whether some things
that men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly
comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained
in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of
Death seems such a thing.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |