 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
25. BOOK XXV.
LUCY, ISABEL, AND PIERRE. PIERRE AT HIS BOOK.
ENCELADUS.
I.
A day or two after the arrival of Lucy, when she had quite
recovered from any possible ill-effects of recent events,—events
conveying such a shock to both Pierre and Isabel,—though to
each in a quite different way,—but not, apparently, at least,
moving Lucy so intensely—as they were all three sitting at
coffee, Lucy expressed her intention to practice her crayon art
professionally. It would be so pleasant an employment for her,
besides contributing to their common fund. Pierre well knew
her expertness in catching likenesses, and judiciously and truthfully
beautifying them; not by altering the features so much,
as by steeping them in a beautifying atmosphere. For even so,
said Lucy, thrown into the Lagoon, and there beheld—as I have
heard—the roughest stones, without transformation, put on the
softest aspects. If Pierre would only take a little trouble to
bring sitters to her room, she doubted not a fine harvest of
heads might easily be secured. Certainly, among the numerous
inmates of the old Church, Pierre must know many who would
have no objections to being sketched. Moreover, though as yet
she had had small opportunity to see them; yet among such a
remarkable company of poets, philosophers, and mystics of all
sorts, there must be some striking heads. In conclusion, she
as having been formerly the studio of an artist, one
window had been considerably elevated, while by a singular arrangement
of the interior shutters, the light could in any direction
be thrown about at will.
Already Pierre had anticipated something of this sort; the
first sight of the easel having suggested it to him. His reply
was therefore not wholly unconsidered. He said, that so far as
she herself was concerned, the systematic practice of her art at
present would certainly be a great advantage in supplying her
with a very delightful occupation. But since she could hardly
hope for any patronage from her mother's fashionable and
wealthy associates; indeed, as such a thing must be very far
from her own desires; and as it was only from the Apostles
she could—for some time to come, at least—reasonably anticipate
sitters; and as those Apostles were almost universally a
very forlorn and penniless set—though in truth there were
some wonderfully rich-looking heads among them—therefore,
Lucy must not look for much immediate pecuniary emolument.
Ere long she might indeed do something very handsome; but
at the outset, it was well to be moderate in her expectations.
This admonishment came, modifiedly, from that certain stoic,
dogged mood of Pierre, born of his recent life, which taught
him never to expect any good from any thing; but always to
anticipate ill; however not in unreadiness to meet the contrary;
and then, if good came, so much the better. He added that
he would that very morning go among the rooms and corridors
of the Apostles, familiarly announcing that his cousin, a lady-artist
in crayons, occupied a room adjoining his, where she
would be very happy to receive any sitters.
“And now, Lucy, what shall be the terms? That is a very
important point, thou knowest.”
“I suppose, Pierre, they must be very low,” said Lucy, looking
at him meditatively.
“Very low, Lucy; very low, indeed.”
“Well, ten dollars, then.”
“Ten Banks of England, Lucy!” exclaimed Pierre. “Why,
Lucy, that were almost a quarter's income for some of the
Apostles!”
“Four dollars, Pierre.”
“I will tell thee now, Lucy—but first, how long does it take
to complete one portrait?”
“Two sittings; and two mornings' work by myself, Pierre.”
“And let me see; what are thy materials? They are not
very costly, I believe. 'Tis not like cutting glass,—thy tools
must not be pointed with diamonds, Lucy?”
“See, Pierre!” said Lucy, holding out her little palm, “see;
this handful of charcoal, a bit of bread, a crayon or two, and a
square of paper:—that is all.”
“Well, then, thou shalt charge one-seventy-five for a portrait.”
“Only one-seventy-five, Pierre?”
“I am half afraid now we have set it far too high, Lucy.
Thou must not be extravagant. Look: if thy terms were ten
dollars, and thou didst crayon on trust; then thou wouldst
have plenty of sitters, but small returns. But if thou puttest
thy terms right-down, and also sayest thou must have thy cash
right-down too—don't start so at that cash—then not so many
sitters to be sure, but more returns. Thou understandest.”
“It shall be just as thou say'st, Pierre.”
“Well, then, I will write a card for thee, stating thy terms;
and put it up conspicuously in thy room, so that every Apostle
may know what he has to expect.”
“Thank thee, thank thee, cousin Pierre,” said Lucy, rising.
“I rejoice at thy pleasant and not entirely unhopeful view of
my poor little plan. But I must be doing something; I must
be earning money. See, I have eaten ever so much bread this
morning, but have not earned one penny.”
With a humorous sadness Pierre measured the large remainder
of the one only piece she had touched, and then would
have spoken banteringly to her; but she had slid away into
her own room.
He was presently roused from the strange revery into which
the conclusion of this scene had thrown him, by the touch of
Isabel's hand upon his knee, and her large expressive glance
upon his face. During all the foregoing colloquy, she had remained
entirely silent; but an unoccupied observer would perhaps
have noticed, that some new and very strong emotions
were restrainedly stirring within her.
“Pierre!” she said, intently bending over toward him.
“Well, well, Isabel,” stammeringly replied Pierre; while a
mysterious color suffused itself over his whole face, neck, and
brow; and involuntarily he started a little back from her self-proffering
form.
Arrested by this movement Isabel eyed him fixedly; then
slowly rose, and with immense mournful stateliness, drew herself
up, and said: “If thy sister can ever come too nigh to
thee, Pierre, tell thy sister so, beforehand; for the September
sun draws not up the valley-vapor more jealously from the disdainful
earth, than my secret god shall draw me up from thee,
if ever I can come too nigh to thee.”
Thus speaking, one hand was on her bosom, as if resolutely
feeling of something deadly there concealed; but, riveted by
her general manner more than by her particular gesture, Pierre,
at the instant, did not so particularly note the all-significant movement
of the hand upon her bosom, though afterward he recalled
it, and darkly and thoroughly comprehended its meaning.
“Too nigh to me, Isabel? Sun or dew, thou fertilizest me!
Can sunbeams or drops of dew come too nigh the thing they
warm and water? Then sit down by me, Isabel, and sit close;
wind in within my ribs,—if so thou canst,—that my one frame
may be the continent of two.”
“Fine feathers make fine birds, so I have heard,” said Isabel,
most bitterly—“but do fine sayings always make fine
deeds? Pierre, thou didst but just now draw away from me!”
“When we would most dearly embrace, we first throw back
our arms, Isabel; I but drew away, to draw so much the closer
to thee.”
“Well; all words are arrant skirmishers; deeds are the army's
self! be it as thou sayest. I yet trust to thee.—Pierre.”
“My breath waits thine; what is it, Isabel?”
“I have been more blockish than a block; I am mad to
think of it! More mad, that her great sweetness should first
remind me of mine own stupidity. But she shall not get the
start of me! Pierre, some way I must work for thee! See,
I will sell this hair; have these teeth pulled out; but some
way I will earn money for thee!”
Pierre now eyed her startledly. Touches of a determinate
meaning shone in her; some hidden thing was deeply wounded
in her. An affectionate soothing syllable was on his tongue;
his arm was out; when shifting his expression, he whisperingly
and alarmedly exclaimed—“Hark! she is coming.—Be still.”
But rising boldly, Isabel threw open the connecting door,
exclaiming half-hysterically—“Look, Lucy; here is the strangest
husband; fearful of being caught speaking to his wife!”
With an artist's little box before her—whose rattling, perhaps,
had startled Pierre—Lucy was sitting mid-way in her
room, opposite the opened door; so that at that moment, both
Pierre and Isabel were plainly visible to her. The singular
tone of Isabel's voice instantly caused her to look up intently.
At once, a sudden irradiation of some subtile intelligence—but
whether welcome to her, or otherwise, could not be determined
—shot over her whole aspect. She murmured some vague
random reply; and then bent low over her box, saying she
was very busy.
Isabel closed the door, and sat down again by Pierre. Her
seemed as one in whom the most powerful emotion of life is
caught in inextricable toils of circumstances, and while longing
to disengage itself, still knows that all struggles will prove
worse than vain; and so, for the moment, grows madly reckless
and defiant of all obstacles. Pierre trembled as he gazed
upon her. But soon the mood passed from her; her old,
sweet mournfulness returned; again the clear unfathomableness
was in her mystic eye.
“Pierre, ere now,—ere I ever knew thee—I have done mad
things, which I have never been conscious of, but in the dim
recalling. I hold such things no things of mine. What I
now remember, as just now done, was one of them.”
“Thou hast done nothing but shown thy strength, while I
have shown my weakness, Isabel;—yes, to the whole world
thou art my wife—to her, too, thou art my wife. Have I not
told her so, myself? I was weaker than a kitten, Isabel; and
thou, strong as those high things angelical, from which utmost
beauty takes not strength.”
“Pierre, once such syllables from thee, were all refreshing,
and bedewing to me; now, though they drop as warmly and
as fluidly from thee, yet falling through another and an intercepting
zone, they freeze on the way, and clatter on my heart
like hail, Pierre.——Thou didst not speak thus to her!”
“She is not Isabel.”
The girl gazed at him with a quick and piercing scrutiny;
then looked quite calm, and spoke. “My guitar, Pierre: thou
know'st how complete a mistress I am of it; now, before thou
gettest sitters for the portrait-sketcher, thou shalt get pupils for
the music-teacher. Wilt thou?” and she looked at him with
a persuasiveness and touchingness, which to Pierre, seemed
more than mortal.
“My poor poor, Isabel!” cried Pierre; “thou art the mistress
of the natural sweetness of the guitar, not of its invented
pay for learning. And what thou hast can not be taught.
Ah, thy sweet ignorance is all transporting to me! my sweet,
my sweet!—dear, divine girl!” And impulsively he caught
her in his arms.
While the first fire of his feeling plainly glowed upon him,
but ere he had yet caught her to him, Isabel had backward
glided close to the connecting door; which, at the instant of
his embrace, suddenly opened, as by its own volition.
Before the eyes of seated Lucy, Pierre and Isabel stood
locked; Pierre's lips upon her cheek.
II.
Notwithstanding the maternal visit of Mrs. Tartan, and the
peremptoriness with which it had been closed by her declared
departure never to return, and her vow to teach all Lucy's relatives
and friends, and Lucy's own brothers, and her suitor, to
disown her, and forget her; yet Pierre fancied that he knew
too much in general of the human heart, and too much in particular
of the character of both Glen and Frederic, to remain
entirely untouched by disquietude, concerning what those two
fiery youths might now be plotting against him, as the imagined
monster, by whose infernal tricks Lucy Tartan was supposed
to have been seduced from every earthly seemliness. Not
happily, but only so much the more gloomily, did he augur
from the fact, that Mrs. Tartan had come to Lucy unattended;
and that Glen and Frederic had let eight-and-forty hours and
more go by, without giving the slightest hostile or neutral sign.
At first he thought, that bridling their impulsive fierceness,
they were resolved to take the slower, but perhaps the surer
method, to wrest Lucy back to them, by instituting some legal
Not only was Frederic of that sort of temper, peculiar to
military men, which would prompt him, in so closely personal
and intensely private and family a matter, to scorn the hireling
publicity of the law's lingering arm; and impel him, as by the
furiousness of fire, to be his own righter and avenger; for, in
him, it was perhaps quite as much the feeling of an outrageous
family affront to himself, through Lucy, as her own presumed
separate wrong, however black, which stung him to the quick:
not only were these things so respecting Frederic; but concerning
Glen, Pierre well knew, that be Glen heartless as he
might, to do a deed of love, Glen was not heartless to do a deed
of hate; that though, on that memorable night of his arrival
in the city, Glen had heartlessly closed his door upon him, yet
now Glen might heartfully burst Pierre's open, if by that he
at all believed, that permanent success would crown the fray.
Besides, Pierre knew this;—that so invincible is the natural,
untamable, latent spirit of a courageous manliness in man, that
though now socially educated for thousands of years in an arbitrary
homage to the Law, as the one only appointed redress
for every injured person; yet immemorially and universally,
among all gentlemen of spirit, once to have uttered independent
personal threats of personal vengeance against your foe, and
then, after that, to fall back slinking into a court, and hire with
sops a pack of yelping pettifoggers to fight the battle so valiantly
proclaimed; this, on the surface, is ever deemed very
decorous, and very prudent—a most wise second thought; but,
at bottom, a miserably ignoble thing. Frederic was not the
watery man for that,—Glen had more grapey blood in him.
Moreover, it seemed quite clear to Pierre, that only by making
out Lucy absolutely mad, and striving to prove it by a
thousand despicable little particulars, could the law succeed in
tearing her from the refuge she had voluntarily sought; a
on either side.
What then would those two boiling bloods do? Perhaps
they would patrol the streets; and at the first glimpse of lonely
Lucy, kidnap her home. Or if Pierre were with her, then,
smite him down by hook or crook, fair play or foul; and then,
away with Lucy! Or if Lucy systematically kept her room,
then fall on Pierre in the most public way, fell him, and cover
him from all decent recognition beneath heaps on heaps of
hate and insult; so that broken on the wheel of such dishonor,
Pierre might feel himself unstrung, and basely yield the
prize.
Not the gibbering of ghosts in any old haunted house; no
sulphurous and portentous sign at night beheld in heaven, will
so make the hair to stand, as when a proud and honorable man
is revolving in his soul the possibilities of some gross public and
corporeal disgrace. It is not fear; it is a pride-horror, which is
more terrible than any fear. Then, by tremendous imagery,
the murderer's mark of Cain is felt burning on the brow, and
the already acquitted knife blood-rusts in the clutch of the anticipating
hand.
Certain that those two youths must be plotting something
furious against him; with the echoes of their scorning curses
on the stairs still ringing in his ears—curses, whose swift responses
from himself, he, at the time, had had much ado to
check;—thoroughly alive to the supernaturalism of that mad
frothing hate which a spirited brother forks forth at the insulter
of a sister's honor—beyond doubt the most uncompromising of all
the social passions known to man—and not blind to the anomalous
fact, that if such a brother stab his foe at his own mother's
table, all people and all juries would bear him out, accounting
every thing allowable to a noble soul made mad by a sweet
sister's shame caused by a damned seducer;—imagining to
himself his own feelings, if he were actually in the position
in love matters jealousy is as an adder, and that the jealousy of
Glen was double-addered by the extraordinary malice of the apparent
circumstances under which Lucy had spurned Glen's
arms, and fled to his always successful and now married rival,
as if wantonly and shamelessly to nestle there;—remembering
all these intense incitements of both those foes of his, Pierre
could not but look forward to wild work very soon to come. Nor
was the storm of passion in his soul unratified by the decision
of his coolest possible hour. Storm and calm both said to
him,—Look to thyself, oh Pierre!
Murders are done by maniacs; but the earnest thoughts of
murder, these are the collected desperadoes. Pierre was such;
fate, or what you will, had made him such. But such he was.
And when these things now swam before him; when he thought
of all the ambiguities which hemmed him in; the stony walls
all round that he could not overleap; the million aggravations
of his most malicious lot; the last lingering hope of happiness
licked up from him as by flames of fire, and his one only
prospect a black, bottomless gulf of guilt, upon whose verge he
imminently teetered every hour;—then the utmost hate of Glen
and Frederic were jubilantly welcome to him; and murder,
done in the act of warding off their ignominious public blow,
seemed the one only congenial sequel to such a desperate
career.
III.
As a statue, planted on a revolving pedestal, shows now this
limb, now that; now front, now back, now side; continually
changing, too, its general profile; so does the pivoted, statued
soul of man, when turned by the hand of Truth. Lies only
never vary; look for no invariableness in Pierre. Nor does
he revolves. Catch his phases as your insight may.
Another day passed on; Glen and Frederic still absenting
themselves, and Pierre and Isabel and Lucy all dwelling together.
The domestic presence of Lucy had begun to produce
a remarkable effect upon Pierre. Sometimes, to the covertly
watchful eye of Isabel, he would seem to look upon Lucy with
an expression illy befitting their singular and so-supposed merely
cousinly relation; and yet again, with another expression
still more unaccountable to her,—one of fear and awe, not unmixed
with impatience. But his general detailed manner toward
Lucy was that of the most delicate and affectionate considerateness—nothing
more. He was never alone with her;
though, as before, at times alone with Isabel.
Lucy seemed entirely undesirous of usurping any place about
him; manifested no slightest unwelcome curiosity as to Pierre,
and no painful embarrassment as to Isabel. Nevertheless, more
and more did she seem, hour by hour, to be somehow inexplicably
sliding between them, without touching them. Pierre
felt that some strange heavenly influence was near him, to keep
him from some uttermost harm; Isabel was alive to some
untraceable displacing agency. Though when all three were
together, the marvelous serenity, and sweetness, and utter unsuspectingness
of Lucy obviated any thing like a common embarrassment:
yet if there was any embarrassment at all beneath
that roof, it was sometimes when Pierre was alone with Isabel,
after Lucy would innocently quit them.
Meantime Pierre was still going on with his book; every
moment becoming still the more sensible of the intensely inauspicious
circumstances of all sorts under which that labor was
proceeding. And as the now advancing and concentring enterprise
demanded more and more compacted vigor from him,
he felt that he was having less and less to bring to it. For not
only was it the signal misery of Pierre, to be invisibly—though
the attempt at a mature work,—a circumstance sufficiently lamentable
in itself; but also, in the hour of his clamorous pennilessness,
he was additionally goaded into an enterprise long
and protracted in the execution, and of all things least calculated
for pecuniary profit in the end. How these things were
so, whence they originated, might be thoroughly and very beneficially
explained; but space and time here forbid.
At length, domestic matters—rent and bread—had come to
such a pass with him, that whether or no, the first pages must
go to the printer; and thus was added still another tribulation;
because the printed pages now dictated to the following manuscript,
and said to all subsequent thoughts and inventions of
Pierre—Thus and thus; so and so; else an ill match. Therefore,
was his book already limited, bound over, and committed
to imperfection, even before it had come to any confirmed form
or conclusion at all. Oh, who shall reveal the horrors of poverty
in authorship that is high? While the silly Millthorpe was
railing against his delay of a few weeks and months; how bitterly
did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart, that to most of the
great works of humanity, their authors had given, not weeks
and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered
and dedicated lives. On either hand clung to by a girl who
would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in
his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from
any thing divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of
hundreds of thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as
at the Pole.
And the great woe of all was this: that all these things
were unsuspected without, and undivulgible from within; the
very daggers that stabbed him were joked at by Imbecility,
Ignorance, Blockheadedness, Self-Complacency, and the universal
Blearedness and Besottedness around him. Now he began
to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were forestallingly cut
things that think, or move, or lie still, seemed as created to
mock and torment him. He seemed gifted with loftiness,
merely that it might be dragged down to the mud. Still, the
profound willfulness in him would not give up. Against the
breaking heart, and the bursting head; against all the dismal
lassitude, and deathful faintness and sleeplessness, and whirlingness,
and craziness, still he like a demigod bore up. His soul's
ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, but resolved to sail on, and
make a courageous wreck. Now he gave jeer for jeer, and
taunted the apes that jibed him. With the soul of an Atheist,
he wrote down the godliest things; with the feeling of misery
and death in him, he created forms of gladness and life. For
the pangs in his heart, he put down hoots on the paper. And
every thing else he disguised under the so conveniently adjustable
drapery of all-stretchable Philosophy. For the more and
the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he
dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal
lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written
thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great
books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the
more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So
that there was nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations;
nothing he more abhorred than the loftiest part of himself.
The brightest success, now seemed intolerable to him,
since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be
the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth
part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing
accidents for the rest. So beforehand he despised those
laurels which in the very nature of things, can never be impartially
bestowed. But while thus all the earth was depopulated
of ambition for him; still circumstances had put him in
the attitude of an eager contender for renown. So beforehand
he felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or
So, beforehand he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine
loftiness for the whole infinite company of infinitesimal critics.
His was the scorn which thinks it not worth the while to be
scornful. Those he most scorned, never knew it. In that
lonely little closet of his, Pierre foretasted all that this world
hath either of praise or dispraise; and thus foretasting both
goblets, anticipatingly hurled them both in its teeth. All panegyric,
all denunciation, all criticism of any sort, would come
too late for Pierre.
But man does never give himself up thus, a doorless and
shutterless house for the four loosened winds of heaven to howl
through, without still additional dilapidations. Much oftener
than before, Pierre laid back in his chair with the deadly feeling
of faintness. Much oftener than before, came staggering
home from his evening walk, and from sheer bodily exhaustion
economized the breath that answered the anxious inquiries as to
what might be done for him. And as if all the leagued spiritual
inveteracies and malices, combined with his general bodily
exhaustion, were not enough, a special corporeal affliction now
descended like a sky-hawk upon him. His incessant application
told upon his eyes. They became so affected, that some
days he wrote with the lids nearly closed, fearful of opening
them wide to the light. Through the lashes he peered upon
the paper, which so seemed fretted with wires. Sometimes he
blindly wrote with his eyes turned away from the paper;—thus
unconsciously symbolizing the hostile necessity and distaste,
the former whereof made of him this most unwilling states-prisoner
of letters.
As every evening, after his day's writing was done, the
proofs of the beginning of his work came home for correction,
Isabel would read them to him. They were replete with errors;
but preoccupied by the thronging, and undiluted, pure
imaginings of things, he became impatient of such minute,
the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished
to the entomological critics.
But at last he received a tremendous interior intimation, to
hold off—to be still from his unnatural struggle.
In the earlier progress of his book, he had found some relief
in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfare
of the city; that so, the utter isolation of his soul,
might feel itself the more intensely from the incessant jogglings
of his body against the bodies of the hurrying thousands.
Then he began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights,
than pleasant ones; for then, the great thoroughfares were less
thronged, and the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat
like schooners' broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged
like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced
ship's blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempests through the
deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark, triumphant joy; that while
others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the
storm-admiral, whose most vindictive peltings of hail-stones,—
striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body,—melted into
soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled from off him.
By-and-by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend
his steps down the dark, narrow side-streets, in quest of the
more secluded and mysterious tap-rooms. There he would feel
a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair,
ordering his half-pint of ale before him, and drawing over his
cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of
the social castaways, who here had their haunts from the bitterest
midnights.
But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and
now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest
warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to
him. Among these he had now been accustomed to wind in
and out every evening; till one night as he paused a moment
all-pervading sensation seized him. He knew not where he
was; he did not have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He
could not see; though instinctively putting his hand to his eyes,
he seemed to feel that the lids were open. Then he was sensible
of a combined blindness, and vertigo, and staggering; before
his eyes a million green meteors danced; he felt his foot
tottering upon the curb, he put out his hands, and knew no
more for the time. When he came to himself he found that
he was lying crosswise in the gutter, dabbled with mud and
slime. He raised himself to try if he could stand; but the
fit was entirely gone. Immediately he quickened his steps
homeward, forbearing to rest or pause at all on the way, lest
that rush of blood to his head, consequent upon his sudden
cessation from walking, should again smite him down. This
circumstance warned him away from those desolate streets, lest
the repetition of the fit should leave him there to perish by
night in unknown and unsuspected loneliness. But if that terrible
vertigo had been also intended for another and deeper
warning, he regarded such added warning not at all; but again
plied heart and brain as before.
But now at last since the very blood in his body had in vain
rebelled against his Titanic soul; now the only visible outward
symbols of that soul—his eyes—did also turn downright traitors
to him, and with more success than the rebellious blood.
He had abused them so recklessly, that now they absolutely
refused to look on paper. He turned them on paper, and
they blinked and shut. The pupils of his eyes rolled away
from him in their own orbits. He put his hand up to them,
and sat back in his seat. Then, without saying one word,
he continued there for his usual term, suspended, motionless,
blank.
But next morning—it was some few days after the arrival
of Lucy—still feeling that a certain downright infatuation, and
of any great, deep book, or even any wholly unsuccessful
attempt at any great, deep book; next morning he returned
to the charge. But again the pupils of his eyes rolled away
from him in their orbits: and now a general and nameless
torpor—some horrible foretaste of death itself—seemed stealing
upon him.
IV.
During this state of semi-unconsciousness, or rather trance,
a remarkable dream or vision came to him. The actual artificial
objects around him slid from him, and were replaced by
a baseless yet most imposing spectacle of natural scenery. But
though a baseless vision in itself, this airy spectacle assumed
very familiar features to Pierre. It was the phantasmagoria of
the Mount of the Titans, a singular height standing quite detached
in a wide solitude not far from the grand range of dark
blue hills encircling his ancestral manor.
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own
ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning
alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each
man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar
mind and mood. Thus a high-aspiring, but most moody,
disappointed bard, chancing once to visit the Meadows and beholding
that fine eminence, christened it by the name it ever
after bore; completely extinguishing its former title—The Delectable
Mountain—one long ago bestowed by an old Baptist
farmer, an hereditary admirer of Bunyan and his most marvelous
book. From the spell of that name the mountain never
afterward escaped; for now, gazing upon it by the light of
those suggestive syllables, no poetical observer could resist the
mount would fain adapt itself to its so recent name, some
people said that it had insensibly changed its pervading aspect
within a score or two of winters. Nor was this strange conceit
entirely without foundation, seeing that the annual displacements
of huge rocks and gigantic trees were continually modifying
its whole front and general contour.
On the north side, where it fronted the old Manor-house,
some fifteen miles distant, the height, viewed from the piazza
of a soft haze-canopied summer's noon, presented a long and
beautiful, but not entirely inaccessible-looking purple precipice,
some two thousand feet in air, and on each hand sideways
sloping down to lofty terraces of pastures.
Those hill-side pastures, be it said, were thickly sown with a
small white amaranthine flower, which, being irreconcilably
distasteful to the cattle, and wholly rejected by them, and yet,
continually multiplying on every hand, did by no means contribute
to the agricultural value of those elevated lands. Insomuch,
that for this cause, the disheartened dairy tenants of
that part of the Manor, had petitioned their lady-landlord for
some abatement in their annual tribute of upland grasses, in
the Juny-load; rolls of butter in the October crock; and steers
and heifers on the October hoof; with turkeys in the Christmas
sleigh.
“The small white flower, it is our bane!” the imploring
tenants cried. “The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs
and adds new terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth,
it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to this! The
terraced pastures grow glittering white, and in warm June still
show like banks of snow:—fit token of the sterileness the
amaranth begets! Then free us from the amaranth, good
lady, or be pleased to abate our rent!”
Now, on a somewhat nearer approach, the precipice did not
belie its purple promise from the manorial piazza—that sweet
Bunyanish old title originally bestowed;—but showed the profuse
aërial foliage of a hanging forest. Nevertheless, coming
still more nigh, long and frequent rents among the mass of
leaves revealed horrible glimpses of dark-dripping rocks, and
mysterious mouths of wolfish caves. Struck by this most unanticipated
view, the tourist now quickened his impulsive steps
to verify the change by coming into direct contact with so
chameleon a height. As he would now speed on, the lower
ground, which from the manor-house piazza seemed all a grassy
level, suddenly merged into a very long and weary acclivity,
slowly rising close up to the precipice's base; so that the
efflorescent grasses rippled against it, as the efflorescent waves
of some great swell or long rolling billow ripple against the
water-line of a steep gigantic war-ship on the sea. And, as
among the rolling sea-like sands of Egypt, disordered rows of
broken Sphinxes lead to the Cheopian pyramid itself; so this
long acclivity was thickly strewn with enormous rocky masses,
grotesque in shape, and with wonderful features on them,
which seemed to express that slumbering intelligence visible in
some recumbent beasts—beasts whose intelligence seems struck
dumb in them by some sorrowful and inexplicable spell.
Nevertheless, round and round those still enchanted rocks,
hard by their utmost rims, and in among their cunning crevices,
the misanthropic hill-scaling goat nibbled his sweetest
food; for the rocks, so barren in themselves, distilled a subtile
moisture, which fed with greenness all things that grew about
their igneous marge.
Quitting those recumbent rocks, you still ascended toward the
hanging forest, and piercing within its lowermost fringe, then
suddenly you stood transfixed, as a marching soldier confounded
at the sight of an impregnable redoubt, where he had fancied
it a practicable vault to his courageous thews. Cunningly
masked hitherto, by the green tapestry of the interlacing leaves,
you; and, trickling with unevaporable moisture, distilled upon
you from its beetling brow slow thunder-showers of water-drops,
chill as the last dews of death. Now you stood and
shivered in that twilight, though it were high noon and burning
August down the meads. All round and round, the grim
scarred rocks rallied and re-rallied themselves; shot up, protruded,
stretched, swelled, and eagerly reached forth; on every
side bristlingly radiating with a hideous repellingness. Tossed,
and piled, and indiscriminate among these, like bridging rifts
of logs up-jammed in alluvial-rushing streams of far Arkansas:
or, like great masts and yards of overwhelmed fleets hurled
high and dashed amain, all splintering together, on hovering
ridges of the Atlantic sea,—you saw the melancholy trophies
which the North Wind, championing the unquenchable quarrel
of the Winter, had wrested from the forests, and dismembered
them on their own chosen battle-ground, in barbarous disdain.
'Mid this spectacle of wide and wanton spoil, insular noises of
falling rocks would boomingly explode upon the silence and
fright all the echoes, which ran shrieking in and out among the
caves, as wailing women and children in some assaulted town.
Stark desolation; ruin, merciless and ceaseless; chills and
gloom,—all here lived a hidden life, curtained by that cunning
purpleness, which, from the piazza of the manor house, so beautifully
invested the mountain once called Delectable, but now
styled Titanic.
Beaten off by such undreamed-of glooms and steeps, you
now sadly retraced your steps, and, mayhap, went skirting the
inferior sideway terraces of pastures; where the multiple and
most sterile inodorous immortalness of the small, white flower
furnished no aliment for the mild cow's meditative end. But
here and there you still might smell from far the sweet aromaticness
of clumps of catnip, that dear farm-house herb. Soon
you would see the modest verdure of the plant itself; and
timbers of log-houses long extinct would also meet your
eye; their desolation illy hid by the green solicitudes of the unemigrating
herb. Most fitly named the catnip; since, like the
unrunagate cat, though all that's human forsake the place, that
plant will long abide, long bask and bloom on the abandoned
hearth. Illy hid; for every spring the amaranthine and celestial
flower gained on the mortal household herb; for every
autumn the catnip died, but never an autumn made the amaranth
to wane. The catnip and the amaranth!—man's earthly
household peace, and the ever-encroaching appetite for God.
No more now you sideways followed the sad pasture's skirt,
but took your way adown the long declivity, fronting the mystic
height. In mid field again you paused among the recumbent
sphinx-like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep. You
paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of awfulness. You
saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants,
writhing from out the imprisoning earth;—turbaned with upborn
moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his
whole striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at
him;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still turning
his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally
in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him
off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly
left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl.
To Pierre this wondrous shape had always been a thing of
interest, though hitherto all its latent significance had never
fully and intelligibly smitten him. In his earlier boyhood a
strolling company of young collegian pedestrians had chanced
to light upon the rock; and, struck with its remarkableness, had
brought a score of picks and spades, and dug round it to unearth
it, and find whether indeed it were a demoniac freak of nature,
or some stern thing of antediluvian art. Accompanying this
eager party, Pierre first beheld that deathless son of Terra. At
nothing but the turbaned head of igneous rock rising from out
the soil, with its unabasable face turned upward toward the
mountain, and the bull-like neck clearly defined. With distorted
features, scarred and broken, and a black brow mocked
by the upborn moss, Enceladus there subterraneously stood,
fast frozen into the earth at the junction of the neck. Spades
and picks soon heaved part of his Ossa from him, till at last a
circular well was opened round him to the depth of some thirteen
feet. At that point the wearied young collegians gave over
their enterprise in despair. With all their toil, they had not
yet come to the girdle of Enceladus. But they had bared good
part of his mighty chest, and exposed his mutilated shoulders,
and the stumps of his once audacious arms. Thus far uncovering
his shame, in that cruel plight they had abandoned him,
leaving stark naked his in vain indignant chest to the defilements
of the birds, which for untold ages had cast their foulness
on his vanquished crest.
Not unworthy to be compared with that leaden Titan,
wherewith the art of Marsy and the broad-flung pride of Bourbon
enriched the enchanted gardens of Versailles;—and from
whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush,
in elemental rivalry with those Etna flames, of old asserted to
be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant;—not unworthy
to be compared with that leaden demi-god—piled with
costly rocks, and with one bent wrenching knee protruding
from the broken bronze;—not unworthy to be compared with
that bold trophy of high art, this American Enceladus, wrought
by the vigorous hand of Nature's self, it did go further than
compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure molded by the
inferior skill of man. Marsy gave arms to the eternally defenseless;
but Nature, more truthful, performed an amputation,
and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball-and-socket
above the thigh.
Such was the wild scenery—the Mount of Titans, and the
repulsed group of heaven-assaulters, with Enceladus in their
midst shamefully recumbent at its base;—such was the wild
scenery, which now to Pierre, in his strange vision, displaced
the four blank walls, the desk, and camp-bed, and domineered
upon his trance. But no longer petrified in all their ignominious
attitudes, the herded Titans now sprung to their feet;
flung themselves up the slope; and anew battered at the precipice's
unresounding wall. Foremost among them all, he saw a
moss-turbaned, armless giant, who despairing of any other
mode of wreaking his immitigable hate, turned his vast trunk
into a battering-ram, and hurled his own arched-out ribs again
and yet again against the invulnerable steep.
“Enceladus! it is Enceladus!”—Pierre cried out in his
sleep. That moment the phantom faced him; and Pierre saw
Enceladus no more; but on the Titan's armless trunk, his own
duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with
prophetic discomfiture and woe. With trembling frame he
started from his chair, and woke from that ideal horror to all
his actual grief.
V.
Nor did Pierre's random knowledge of the ancient fables fail
still further to elucidate the vision which so strangely had supplied
a tongue to muteness. But that elucidation was most
repulsively fateful and foreboding; possibly because Pierre did
not leap the final barrier of gloom; possibly because Pierre did
not willfully wrest some final comfort from the fable; did not
flog this stubborn rock as Moses his, and force even aridity itself
to quench his painful thirst.
Thus smitten, the Mount of Titans seems to yield this following
stream:—
Old Titan's self was the son of incestuous Cœlus and Terra,
the son of incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married
his mother Terra, another and accumulatively incestuous match.
And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So Enceladus was both
the son and grandson of an incest; and even thus, there had
been born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness
of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but
still not wholly earth-emancipated mood; which again, by its
terrestrial taint held down to its terrestrial mother, generated
there the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him; so
that the present mood of Pierre—that reckless sky-assaulting
mood of his, was nevertheless on one side the grandson of the
sky. For it is according to eternal fitness, that the precipitated
Titan should still seek to regain his paternal birthright even by
fierce escalade. Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best
proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in
the moat before that crystal fort, shows it was born within
that slime, and there forever will abide.
Recovered somewhat from the after-spell of this wild vision
folded in his trance, Pierre composed his front as best he might,
and straightway left his fatal closet. Concentrating all the remaining
stuff in him, he resolved by an entire and violent
change, and by a willful act against his own most habitual inclinations,
to wrestle with the strange malady of his eyes, this
new death-fiend of the trance, and this Inferno of his Titanic
vision.
And now, just as he crossed the threshold of the closet, he
writhingly strove to assume an expression intended to be not
uncheerful—though how indeed his countenance at all looked,
he could not tell; for dreading some insupportably dark revealments
in his glass, he had of late wholly abstained from
appealing to it—and in his mind he rapidly conned over, what
should say, when proposing to his companions the little design
he cherished.
And even so, to grim Enceladus, the world the gods had
chained for a ball to drag at his o'erfreighted feet;—even so
that globe put forth a thousand flowers, whose fragile smiles
disguised his ponderous load.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |