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 expressed her satisfaction at
the chamber prepared for her, inasmuch 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 midway 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 countenance
wore a mixed and writhing, impatient look. She 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 regulated
artifices; and these are all that the silly pupil will 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 process. But this idea was
repulsed by more than one consideration.
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 course equally abhorrent to all the parties
possibly to be concerned 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 which Frederic so vividly fancied to
be his; remembering that 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 any canting showman here stand by to announce his
phases as 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 but accidentally--goaded, in the hour of mental
immaturity, to 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 by the scissors of Fate. He felt as a moose,
hamstrung. All 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
dove-tailing 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 censures, equally unsought for, and
equally loathed ere given. 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, gnat-like torments; he randomly corrected the worst, and let
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 previous to turning about for home, a sudden, unwonted, and
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 no less, is both
unavoidable and indispensable in the composition 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 apparent felicity of the title. For as if indeed the
immemorial 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 imposing purple
promise, which seemed fully to vindicate the Bunyanish old title
originally bestowed;--but showed the profuse aerial 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, a terrific towering palisade of dark mossy
massiness confronted 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 cud. 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
wheresoever you saw that sight, old foundation stones and rotting
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 that time, in its untouched natural state, the statue
presented 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 Coelus 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 indifferent, disguising, or light-hearted gamesome things he
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.