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
brow, old Saturn cross-legged sat. The whole countenance
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
to open a book. There were no books in his chamber. Nevertheless,
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
tower, which on the opposite side of the quadrangular space,
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
the force of peculiar circumstances, Pierre while in the stage,
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
suggest themselves; when a thought of the vanity of his
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
tried his best to procure the pamphlet, to read it now by the
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
first read by him in the stage. Could he likewise have carried
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.
