 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
7. BOOK VII.
INTERMEDIATE BETWEEN PIERRE'S TWO INTERVIEWS
WITH ISABEL AT THE FARM-HOUSE.
I.
Not immediately, not for a long time, could Pierre fully, or
by any approximation, realize the scene which he had just departed.
But the vague revelation was now in him, that the
visible world, some of which before had seemed but too common
and prosaic to him; and but too intelligible; he now
vaguely felt, that all the world, and every misconceivedly common
and prosaic thing in it, was steeped a million fathoms in a
mysteriousness wholly hopeless of solution. First, the enigmatical
story of the girl, and the profound sincerity of it, and
yet the ever accompanying haziness, obscurity, and almost
miraculousness of it;—first, this wonderful story of the girl had
displaced all commonness and prosaicness from his soul; and
then, the inexplicable spell of the guitar, and the subtleness of
the melodious appealings of the few brief words from Isabel
sung in the conclusion of the melody—all this had bewitched
him, and enchanted him, till he had sat motionless and bending
over, as a tree-transformed and mystery-laden visitant, caught
and fast bound in some necromancer's garden.
But as now burst from these sorceries, he hurried along the
open road, he strove for the time to dispel the mystic feeling, or
at least postpone it for a while, until he should have time to
of that day's long fastings and wanderings, and that
night's never-to-be-forgotten scene. He now endeavored to beat
away all thoughts from him, but of present bodily needs.
Passing through the silent village, he heard the clock tell the
mid hour of night. Hurrying on, he entered the mansion by a
private door, the key of which hung in a secret outer place.
Without undressing, he flung himself upon the bed. But remembering
himself again, he rose and adjusted his alarm-clock,
so that it would emphatically repeat the hour of five. Then to
bed again, and driving off all intrudings of thoughtfulness, and
resolutely bending himself to slumber, he by-and-by fell into its
at first reluctant, but at last welcoming and hospitable arms.
At five he rose; and in the east saw the first spears of the
advanced-guard of the day.
It had been his purpose to go forth at that early hour, and
so avoid all casual contact with any inmate of the mansion, and
spend the entire day in a second wandering in the woods, as
the only fit prelude to the society of so wild a being as his newfound
sister Isabel. But the familiar home-sights of his chamber
strangely worked upon him. For an instant, he almost
could have prayed Isabel back into the wonder-world from
which she had so slidingly emerged. For an instant, the fond,
all-understood blue eyes of Lucy displaced the as tender, but
mournful and inscrutable dark glance of Isabel. He seemed
placed between them, to choose one or the other; then both
seemed his; but into Lucy's eyes there stole half of the mournfulness
of Isabel's, without diminishing hers.
Again the faintness, and the long life-weariness benumbed
him. He left the mansion, and put his bare forehead against
the restoring wind. He re-entered the mansion, and adjusted
the clock to repeat emphatically the call of seven; and then
lay upon his bed. But now he could not sleep. At seven he
changed his dress; and at half-past eight went below to meet
her step upon the stair.
II.
He saluted her; but she looked gravely and yet alarmedly,
and then in a sudden, illy-repressed panic, upon him. Then he
knew he must be wonderfully changed. But his mother spoke
not to him, only to return his good-morning. He saw that she
was deeply offended with him, on many accounts; moreover,
that she was vaguely frightened about him, and finally that notwithstanding
all this, her stung pride conquered all apprehensiveness
in her; and he knew his mother well enough to be very
certain that, though he should unroll a magician's parchment
before her now, she would verbally express no interest, and seek
no explanation from him. Nevertheless, he could not entirely
abstain from testing the power of her reservedness.
“I have been quite an absentee, sister Mary,” said he, with
ill-affected pleasantness.
“Yes, Pierre. How does the coffee suit you this morning?
It is some new coffee.”
“It is very nice; very rich and odorous, sister Mary.”
“I am glad you find it so, Pierre.”
“Why don't you call me brother Pierre?”
“Have I not called you so? Well, then, brother Pierre,—is
that better?”
“Why do you look so indifferently and icily upon me, sister
Mary?”
“Do I look indifferently and icily? Then I will endeavor to
look otherwise. Give me the toast there, Pierre.”
“You are very deeply offended at me, my dear mother.”
“Not in the slightest degree, Pierre. Have you seen Lucy
lately?”
“I have not, my mother.”
“Ah! A bit of salmon, Pierre.”
“You are too proud to show toward me what you are this
moment feeling, my mother.”
Mrs. Glendinning slowly rose to her feet, and her full stature
of womanly beauty and majesty stood imposingly over him.
“Tempt me no more, Pierre. I will ask no secret from thee;
all shall be voluntary between us, as it ever has been, until very
lately, or all shall be nothing between us. Beware of me,
Pierre. There lives not that being in the world of whom thou
hast more reason to beware, so you continue but a little longer
to act thus with me.”
She reseated herself, and spoke no more. Pierre kept silence;
and after snatching a few mouthfuls of he knew not what, silently
quitted the table, and the room, and the mansion.
III.
As the door of the breakfast-room closed upon Pierre, Mrs.
Glendinning rose, her fork unconsciously retained in her hand.
Presently, as she paced the room in deep, rapid thought, she
became conscious of something strange in her grasp, and without
looking at it, to mark what it was, impulsively flung it
from her. A dashing noise was heard, and then a quivering.
She turned; and hanging by the side of Pierre's portrait, she
saw her own smiling picture pierced through, and the fork,
whose silver tines had caught in the painted bosom, vibratingly
rankled in the wound.
She advanced swiftly to the picture, and stood intrepidly be
fore it.
“Yes, thou art stabbed! but the wrong hand stabbed thee;
this should have been thy silver blow,” turning to Pierre's portrait
face. “Pierre, Pierre, thou hast stabbed me with a poisoned
point. I feel my blood chemically changing in me. I,
the mother of the only surnamed Glendinning, I feel now as
though I had borne the last of a swiftly to be extinguished race.
For swiftly to be extinguished is that race, whose only heir but
so much as impends upon a deed of shame. And some deed
of shame, or something most dubious and most dark, is in thy
soul, or else some belying specter, with a cloudy, shame-faced
front, sat at yon seat but now! What can it be? Pierre, unbosom.
Smile not so lightly upon my heavy grief. Answer;
what is it, boy? Can it? can it? no—yes—surely—can it?
it can not be! But he was not at Lucy's yesterday; nor was
she here; and she would not see me when I called. What
can this bode? But not a mere broken match—broken as
lovers sometimes break, to mend the break with joyful tears,
so soon again—not a mere broken match can break my proud
heart so. If that indeed be part, it is not all. But no, no, no;
it can not, can not be. He would not, could not, do so mad,
so impious a thing. It was a most surprising face, thought I
confessed it not to him, nor even hinted that I saw it. But no,
no, no, it can not be. Such young peerlessness in such humbleness,
can not have an honest origin. Lilies are not stalked
on weeds, though polluted, they sometimes may stand among
them. She must be both poor and vile—some chance-blow of
a splendid, worthless rake, doomed to inherit both parts of her
infecting portion—vileness and beauty. No, I will not think it
of him. But what then? Sometimes I have feared that my
pride would work me some woe incurable, by closing both my
lips, and varnishing all my front, where I perhaps ought to be
wholly in the melted and invoking mood. But who can get
at one's own heart, to mend it? Right one's self against another,
that, one may sometimes do; but when that other is
out. I will stand on pride. I will not budge. Let come
what will, I shall not half-way run to meet it, to beat it off.
Shall a mother abase herself before her stripling boy? Let
him tell me of himself, or let him slide adown!”
IV.
Pierre plunged deep into the woods, and paused not for
several miles; paused not till he came to a remarkable stone, or
rather, smoothed mass of rock, huge as a barn, which, wholly
isolated horizontally, was yet sweepingly overarched by beech-trees
and chestnuts.
It was shaped something like a lengthened egg, but flattened
more; and, at the ends, pointed more; and yet not pointed,
but irregularly wedge-shaped. Somewhere near the middle
of its under side, there was a lateral ridge; and an obscure
point of this ridge rested on a second lengthwise-sharpened rock,
slightly protruding from the ground. Beside that one obscure
and minute point of contact, the whole enormous and most
ponderous mass touched not another object in the wide terraqueous
world. It was a breathless thing to see. One broad
haunched end hovered within an inch of the soil, all along to
the point of teetering contact; but yet touched not the soil.
Many feet from that—beneath one part of the opposite end,
which was all seamed and half-riven—the vacancy was considerably
larger, so as to make it not only possible, but convenient
to admit a crawling man; yet no mortal being had
ever been known to have the intrepid heart to crawl there.
It might well have been the wonder of all the country
round. But strange to tell, though hundreds of cottage
hearthstones—where, of long winter-evenings, both old men
it, at no very remote distance, yet had the youthful
Pierre been the first known publishing discoverer of this stone,
which he had thereupon fancifully christened the Memnon
Stone. Possibly, the reason why this singular object had so
long remained unblazoned to the world, was not so much because
it had never before been lighted on—though indeed,
both belted and topped by the dense deep luxuriance of the
aboriginal forest, it lay like Captain Kidd's sunken hull in the
gorge of the river Hudson's Highlands,—its crown being full
eight fathoms under high-foliage mark during the great springtide
of foliage;—and besides this, the cottagers had no special
motive for visiting its more immediate vicinity at all; their
timber and fuel being obtained from more accessible woodlands
—as because, even, if any of the simple people should have
chanced to have beheld it, they, in their hoodwinked unappreciativeness,
would not have accounted it any very marvelous
sight, and therefore, would never have thought it worth their
while to publish it abroad. So that in real truth, they might
have seen it, and yet afterward have forgotten so inconsiderable
a circumstance. In short, this wondrous Memnon Stone
could be no Memnon Stone to them; nothing but a huge
stumbling-block, deeply to be regretted as a vast prospective
obstacle in the way of running a handy little cross-road
through that wild part of the Manor.
Now one day while reclining near its flank, and intently
eying it, and thinking how surprising it was, that in so long-settled
a country he should have been the first discerning and
appreciative person to light upon such a great natural curiosity,
Pierre happened to brush aside several successive layers
of old, gray-haired, close cropped, nappy moss, and beneath, to
his no small amazement, he saw rudely hammered in the rock
some half-obliterate initials—“S. ye W.” Then he knew, that
ignorant of the stone, as all the simple country round might
being who had discovered that marvelous impending spectacle:
but long and long ago, in quite another age, the stone had
been beheld, and its wonderfulness fully appreciated—as the
painstaking initials seemed to testify—by some departed man,
who, were he now alive, might possibly wag a beard old as the
most venerable oak of centuries' growth. But who,—who in
Methuselah's name,—who might have been this “S. ye W?”
Pierre pondered long, but could not possibly imagine; for the
initials, in their antiqueness, seemed to point to some period before
the era of Columbus' discovery of the hemisphere. Happening
in the end to mention the strange matter of these initials
to a white-haired old gentleman, his city kinsman, who, after a
long and richly varied, but unfortunate life, had at last found
great solace in the Old Testament, which he was continually
studying with ever-increasing admiration; this white-haired old
kinsman, after having learnt all the particulars about the stone
—its bulk, its height, the precise angle of its critical impendings,
and all that,—and then, after much prolonged cogitation
upon it, and several long-drawn sighs, and aged looks of hoar
significance, and reading certain verses in Ecclesiastes; after all
these tedious preliminaries, this not-at-all-to-be-hurried white-haired
old kinsman, had laid his tremulous hand upon Pierre's
firm young shoulder, and slowly whispered—“Boy; 'tis Solomon
the Wise.” Pierre could not repress a merry laugh at
this; wonderfully diverted by what seemed to him so queer
and crotchety a conceit; which he imputed to the alledged
dotage of his venerable kinsman, who he well knew had once
maintained, that the old Scriptural Ophir was somewhere on
our northern sea-coast; so no wonder the old gentleman should
fancy that King Solomon might have taken a trip—as a sort
of amateur supercargo—of some Tyre or Sidon gold-ship across
the water, and happened to light on the Memnon Stone, while
rambling about with bow and quiver shooting partridges.
But merriment was by no means Pierre's usual mood when
thinking of this stone; much less when seated in the woods,
he, in the profound significance of that deep forest silence,
viewed its marvelous impendings. A flitting conceit had often
crossed him, that he would like nothing better for a head-stone
than this same imposing pile; in which, at times, during the
soft swayings of the surrounding foliage, there seemed to lurk
some mournful and lamenting plaint, as for some sweet boy
long since departed in the antediluvian time.
Not only might this stone well have been the wonder of the
simple country round, but it might well have been its terror.
Sometimes, wrought to a mystic mood by contemplating its
ponderous inscrutableness, Pierre had called it the Terror
Stone. Few could be bribed to climb its giddy height, and
crawl out upon its more hovering end. It seemed as if the
dropping of one seed from the beak of the smallest flying bird
would topple the immense mass over, crashing against the trees.
It was a very familiar thing to Pierre; he had often climbed
it, by placing long poles against it, and so creeping up to where
it sloped in little crumbling stepping-places; or by climbing
high up the neighboring beeches, and then lowering himself
down upon the forehead-like summit by the elastic branches.
But never had he been fearless enough—or rather fool-hardy
enough, it may be, to crawl on the ground beneath the vacancy
of the higher end; that spot first menaced by the Terror Stone
should it ever really topple.
V.
Yet now advancing steadily, and as if by some interior predetermination,
and eying the mass unfalteringly; he then
threw himself prone upon the wood's last year's leaves, and slid
dead. He spoke not, for speechless thoughts were in him.
These gave place at last to things less and less unspeakable;
till at last, from beneath the very brow of the beetlings and
the menacings of the Terror Stone came the audible words of
Pierre:—
“If the miseries of the undisclosable things in me, shall ever
unhorse me from my manhood's seat; if to vow myself all
Virtue's and all Truth's, be but to make a trembling, distrusted
slave of me; if Life is to prove a burden I can not bear without
ignominious cringings; if indeed our actions are all foreordained,
and we are Russian serfs to Fate; if invisible devils
do titter at us when we most nobly strive; if Life be a cheating
dream, and virtue as unmeaning and unsequeled with any
blessing as the midnight mirth of wine; if by sacrificing myself
for Duty's sake, my own mother re-sacrifices me; if Duty's self
be but a bugbear, and all things are allowable and unpunishable
to man;—then do thou, Mute Massiveness, fall on me! Ages
thou hast waited; and if these things be thus, then wait no
more; for whom better canst thou crush than him who now
lies here invoking thee?”
A down-darting bird, all song, swiftly lighted on the unmoved
and eternally immovable balancings of the Terror Stone,
and cheerfully chirped to Pierre. The tree-boughs bent and
waved to the rushes of a sudden, balmy wind; and slowly
Pierre crawled forth, and stood haughtily upon his feet, as he
owed thanks to none, and went his moody way.
VI.
When in his imaginative ruminating moods of early youth,
Pierre had christened the wonderful stone by the old resounding
name of Memnon, he had done so merely from certain associative
remembrances of that Egyptian marvel, of which all
Eastern travelers speak. And when the fugitive thought had
long ago entered him of desiring that same stone for his head-stone,
when he should be no more; then he had only yielded
to one of those innumerable fanciful notions, tinged with
dreamy painless melancholy, which are frequently suggested
to the mind of a poetic boy. But in after-times, when placed
in far different circumstances from those surrounding him at
the Meadows, Pierre pondered on the stone, and his young
thoughts concerning it, and, later, his desperate act in crawling
under it; then an immense significance came to him, and the
long-passed unconscious movements of his then youthful heart
seemed now prophetic to him, and allegorically verified by the
subsequent events.
For, not to speak of the other and subtler meanings which
lie crouching behind the colossal haunches of this stone, regarded
as the menacingly impending Terror Stone—hidden to
all the simple cottagers, but revealed to Pierre—consider its
aspects as the Memnon Stone. For Memnon was that dewey,
royal boy, son of Aurora, and born King of Egypt, who, with
enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another's account into
a rightful quarrel, fought hand to hand with his overmatch,
and met his boyish and most dolorous death beneath the walls
of Troy. His wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to
commemorate his untimely fate. Touched by the breath of
the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a
mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered,
being too harshly wound.
Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive
fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique
world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago: “The
flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance.” And the
English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and
modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakespeare had his
fathers too.
Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present
day, so does that nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character
in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the
sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type.
But Memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously resound;
now all is mute. Fit emblem that of old, poetry was a consecration
and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life;
but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's
music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm
alike the monument and the dirge.
VII.
As Pierre went on through the woods, all thoughts now
left him but those investing Isabel. He strove to condense her
mysterious haze into some definite and comprehensible shape.
He could not but infer that the feeling of bewilderment, which
she had so often hinted of during their interview, had caused
her continually to go aside from the straight line of her narration;
and finally to end it in an abrupt and enigmatical obscurity.
But he also felt assured, that as this was entirely
unintended, and now, doubtless, regretted by herself, so their
coming second interview would help to clear up much of this
mysteriousness; considering that the elapsing interval would
do much to tranquilize her, and rally her into less of wonderfulness
in naming the postponing hour he had. For, indeed,
looking from the morning down the vista of the day, it seemed
as indefinite and interminable to him. He could not bring
himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any
sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the
slightest passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling
to him. Likewise in his own mind all remembrances and
imaginings that had to do with the common and general humanity
had become, for the time, in the most singular manner
distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing all that was common
in the two different worlds—that without, and that within
—nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region
of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one
single agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary
soul.
Men in general seldom suffer from this utter pauperism of
the spirit. If God hath not blessed them with incurable frivolity,
men in general have still some secret thing of self-conceit
or virtuous gratulation; men in general have always done some
small self-sacrificing deed for some other man; and so, in those
now and then recurring hours of despondent lassitude, which
must at various and differing intervals overtake almost every
civilized human being; such persons straightway bethink them
of their one, or two, or three small self-sacrificing things, and
suck respite, consolation, and more or less compensating deliciousness
from it. But with men of self-disdainful spirits; in
whose chosen souls heaven itself hath by a primitive persuasion
unindoctrinally fixed that most true Christian doctrine of the
utter nothingness of good works; the casual remembrance of
their benevolent well-doings, does never distill one drop of comfort
for them, even as (in harmony with the correlative Scripture
doctrine) the recalling of their outlived errors and misdeeds,
conveys to them no slightest pang or shadow of reproach.
Though the clew-defying mysteriousness of Isabel's narration,
did now for the time, in this particular mood of his, put on a
repelling aspect to our Pierre; yet something must occupy the
soul of man; and Isabel was nearest to him then; and Isabel
he thought of; at first, with great discomfort and with pain, but
anon (for heaven eventually rewards the resolute and duteous
thinker) with lessening repugnance, and at last with still-increasing
willingness and congenialness. Now he recalled his
first impressions, here and there, while she was rehearsing to
him her wild tale; he recalled those swift but mystical corroborations
in his own mind and memory, which by shedding
another twinkling light upon her history, had but increased
its mystery, while at the same time remarkably substantiating
it.
Her first recallable recollection was of an old deserted chateau-like
house in a strange, French-like country, which she dimly
imagined to be somewhere beyond the sea. Did not this surprisingly
correspond with certain natural inferences to be drawn
from his Aunt Dorothea's account of the disappearance of the
French young lady? Yes; the French young lady's disappearance
on this side the water was only contingent upon her
reappearance on the other; then he shuddered as he darkly
pictured the possible sequel of her life, and the wresting from
her of her infant, and its immurement in the savage mountain
wilderness.
But Isabel had also vague impressions of herself crossing the
sea;—recrossing, emphatically thought Pierre, as he pondered
on the unbidden conceit, that she had probably first unconsciously
and smuggledly crossed it hidden beneath her sorrowing
mother's heart. But in attempting to draw any inferences,
from what he himself had ever heard, for a coinciding proof or
elucidation of this assumption of Isabel's actual crossing the sea
at so tender an age; here Pierre felt all the inadequateness of
both his own and Isabel's united knowledge, to clear up the
this irremovable obscurity he bowed himself, and strove to dismiss
it from his mind, as worse than hopeless. So, also, in a
good degree, did he endeavor to drive out of him, Isabel's reminiscence
of the, to her, unnameable large house, from which she
had been finally removed by the pleasant woman in the coach.
This episode in her life, above all other things, was most cruelly
suggestive to him, as possibly involving his father in the
privity to a thing, at which Pierre's inmost soul fainted with
amazement and abhorrence. Here the helplessness of all further
light, and the eternal impossibility of logically exonerating
his dead father, in his own mind, from the liability to this, and
many other of the blackest self-insinuated suppositions; all this
came over Pierre with a power so infernal and intense, that it
could only have proceeded from the unretarded malice of the
Evil One himself. But subtilly and wantonly as these conceits
stole into him, Pierre as subtilly opposed them; and with the
hue-and-cry of his whole indignant soul, pursued them forth
again into the wide Tartarean realm from which they had
emerged.
The more and the more that Pierre now revolved the story
of Isabel in his mind, so much the more he amended his original
idea, that much of its obscurity would depart upon a
second interview. He saw, or seemed to see, that it was not
so much Isabel who had by her wild idiosyncrasies mystified
the narration of her history, as it was the essential and unavoidable
mystery of her history itself, which had invested
Isabel with such wonderful enigmas to him.
VIII.
The issue of these reconsiderings was the conviction, that
all he could now reasonably anticipate from Isabel, in further
disclosure on the subject of her life, were some few additional
particulars bringing it down to the present moment; and, also,
possibly filling out the latter portion of what she had already
revealed to him. Nor here, could he persuade himself, that
she would have much to say. Isabel had not been so digressive
and withholding as he had thought. What more, indeed,
could she now have to impart, except by what strange means
she had at last come to find her brother out; and the dreary
recital of how she had pecuniarily wrestled with her destitute
condition; how she had come to leave one place of toiling
refuge for another, till now he found her in humble servitude
at farmer Ulver's? Is it possible then, thought Pierre, that
there lives a human creature in this common world of every-days,
whose whole history may be told in little less than two-score
words, and yet embody in that smallness a fathomless
fountain of ever-welling mystery? Is it possible, after all, that
spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is
brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our
garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars
themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
The intuitively certain, however literally unproven fact of
Isabel's sisterhood to him, was a link that he now felt binding
him to a before unimagined and endless chain of wondering.
His very blood seemed to flow through all his arteries with
unwonted subtileness, when he thought that the same tide
flowed through the mystic veins of Isabel. All his occasional
pangs of dubiousness as to the grand governing thing of all—
the reality of the physical relationship—only recoiled back upon
him with added tribute of both certainty and insolubleness.
She is my sister—my own father's daughter. Well; why
do I believe it? The other day I had not so much as heard
the remotest rumor of her existence; and what has since occurred
to change me? What so new and incontestable vouchers
have I handled? None at all. But I have seen her. Well;
grant it; I might have seen a thousand other girls, whom I
had never seen before; but for that, I would not own any one
among them for my sister. But the portrait, the chair-portrait,
Pierre? Think of that. But that was painted before Isabel
was born; what can that portrait have to do with Isabel? It
is not the portrait of Isabel, it is my father's portrait; and yet
my mother swears it is not he.
Now alive as he was to all these searching argumentative
itemizings of the minutest known facts any way bearing upon
the subject; and yet, at the same time, persuaded, strong as
death, that in spite of them, Isabel was indeed his sister; how
could Pierre, naturally poetic, and therefore piercing as he
was; how could he fail to acknowledge the existence of that
all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness, which, when
imperfectly and isolatedly recognized by the generality, is so
significantly denominated The Finger of God? But it is not
merely the Finger, it is the whole outspread Hand of God;
for doth not Scripture intimate, that He holdeth all of us in
the hollow of His hand?—a Hollow, truly!
Still wandering through the forest, his eye pursuing its evershifting
shadowy vistas; remote from all visible haunts and
traces of that strangely wilful race, who, in the sordid traffickings
of clay and mud, are ever seeking to denationalize the natural
heavenliness of their souls; there came into the mind of
Pierre, thughts and fancies never imbibed within the gates of
towns; but only given forth by the atmosphere of primeval
forests, which, with the eternal ocean, are the only unchanged
general objects remaining to this day, from those that originally
met the gaze of Adam. For so it is, that the apparently most
are, in this view, immensely the most endurable.
Now all his ponderings, however excursive, wheeled round
Isabel as their center; and back to her they came again from
every excursion; and again derived some new, small germs for
wonderment.
The question of Time occurred to Pierre. How old was Isabel?
According to all reasonable inferences from the presumed
circumstnaces of her life, she was his elder, certainly, though by
uncertain years; yet her whole aspect was that of more than
childlikeness; nevertheless, not only did he feel his muscular
superiority to her, so to speak, which made him spontaneously
alive to a feeling of elderly protectingness over her; not only
did he experience the thoughts of superior world-acquaintance,
and general cultured knowledge; but spite of reason's self, and
irrespective of all mere computings, he was conscious of a feeling
which independently pronounced him her senior in point of
Time, and Isabel a child of everlasting youngness. This strange,
though strong conceit of his mysterious persuasion, doubtless,
had its untraced, and but little-suspected origin in his mind,
from ideas born of his devout meditations upon the artless infantileness
of her face; which, though profoundly mournful in
the general expression, yet did not, by any means, for that cause,
lose one whit in its singular infantileness; as the faces of real
infants, in their earliest visibleness, do oft-times wear a look of
deep and endless sadness. But it was not the sadness, nor indeed,
strictly speaking, the infantileness of the face of Isabel
which so singularly impressed him with the idea of her original
and changeless youthfulness. It was something else; yet something
which entirely eluded him.
Imaginatively exalted by the willing suffrages of all mankind
into higher and purer realms than men themselves inhabit;
beautiful women—those of them at least who are beautiful in
soul as well as body—do, notwithstanding the relentless law of
exempt from the incantations of decay; for as the outward
loveliness touch by touch departs, the interior beauty touch by
touch replaces that departing bloom, with charms, which, underivable
from earth, possess the ineffaceableness of stars. Else,
why at the age of sixty, have some women held in the strongest
bonds of love and fealty, men young enough to be their
grandsons? And why did all-seducing Ninon unintendingly
break scores of hearts at seventy? It is because of the perennialness
of womanly sweetness.
Out from the infantile, yet eternal mournfulness of the face
of Isabel, there looked on Pierre that angelic childlikeness,
which our Savior hints is the one only investiture of translated
souls; for of such—even of little children—is the other world.
Now, unending as the wonderful rivers, which once bathed
the feet of the primeval generations, and still remain to flow
fast by the graves of all succeeding men, and by the beds of
all now living; unending, ever-flowing, ran through the soul
of Pierre, fresh and fresher, further and still further, thoughts
of Isabel. But the more his thoughtful river ran, the more
mysteriousness it floated to him; and yet the more certainty
that the mysteriousness was unchangeable. In her life there
was an unraveled plot; and he felt that unraveled it would
eternally remain to him. No slightest hope or dream had he,
that what was dark and mournful in her would ever be cleared
up into some coming atmosphere of light and mirth. Like all
youths, Pierre had conned his novel-lessons; had read more
novels than most persons of his years; but their false, inverted
attempts at systematizing eternally unsystemizable elements;
their audacious, intermeddling impotency, in trying to unravel,
and spread out, and classify, the more thin than gossamer
threads which make up the complex web of life; these things
over Pierre had no power now. Straight through their helpless
miserableness he pierced; the one sensational truth in him.
that human life doth truly come from that, which all men are
agreed to call by the name of God; and that it partakes of the
unravelable inscrutableness of God. By infallible presentiment
he saw, that not always doth life's beginning gloom conclude
in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last
scene of life's fifth act; that while the countless tribes of common
novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently
clear them up at last; and while the countless tribe of
common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder
emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that
can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel
their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect,
unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated
stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides
of time and fate.
So Pierre renounced all thought of ever having Isabel's dark-lantern
illuminated to him. Her light was lidded, and the lid
was locked. Nor did he feel a pang at this. By posting
hither and thither among the reminiscences of his family, and
craftily interrogating his remaining relatives on his father's side,
he might possibly rake forth some few small grains of dubious
and most unsatisfying things, which, were he that way strongly
bent, would only serve the more hopelessly to cripple him in
his practical resolves. He determined to pry not at all into
this sacred problem. For him now the mystery of Isabel possessed
all the bewitchingness of the mysterious vault of night,
whose very darkness evokes the witchery.
The thoughtful river still ran on in him, and now it floated
still another thing to him.
Though the letter of Isabel gushed with all a sister's sacred
longings to embrace her brother, and in the most abandoned
terms painted the anguish of her life-long estrangement from
him; and though, in effect, it took vows to this,—that without
fit to be thrown into the nearest unfathomed pool, or rushing
stream; yet when the brother and the sister had encountered,
according to the set appointment, none of these impassionedments
had been repeated. She had more than thrice thanked
God, and most earnestly blessed himself, that now he had come
near to her in her loneliness; but no gesture of common and
customary sisterly affection. Nay, from his embrace had she
not struggled? nor kissed him once; nor had he kissed her,
except when the salute was solely sought by him.
Now Pierre began to see mysteries interpierced with mysteries,
and mysteries eluding mysteries; and began to seem to
see the mere imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle
of human association. Fate had done this thing for them.
Fate had separated the brother and the sister, till to each other
they somehow seemed so not at all. Sisters shrink not from
their brother's kisses. And Pierre felt that never, never would
he be able to embrace Isabel with the mere brotherly embrace;
while the thought of any other caress, which took hold of any
domesticness, was entirely vacant from his uncontaminated soul,
for it had never consciously intruded there.
Therefore, forever unsistered for him by the stroke of Fate,
and apparently forever, and twice removed from the remotest
possibility of that love which had drawn him to his Lucy; yet
still the object of the ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul;
therefore, to him, Isabel wholly soared out of the realms of mortalness,
and for him became transfigured in the highest heaven
of uncorrupted Love.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |