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390 II

When arrived in the city, and discovering the heartless neglect of Glen, Pierre—looking about him for whom to apply to in this strait—bethought him of his old boy-companion Charlie, and went out to seek him, and found him at last; he saw before him, a tall, well-grown, but rather thin and pale yet strikingly handsome young man of two-and-twenty; occupying a small dusty law-office on the third floor of the older building of the Apostles'; assuming to be doing a very large, and hourly increasing business among empty pigeon-holes, and directly under the eye of an unopened bottle of ink; his mother and sisters dwelling in a chamber overhead; and himself, not only following the law for a corporeal living, but likewise interlinked with the peculiar secret, theologico-politico-social schemes of the masonic order of the seedy-coated Apostles; and pursuing some crude, transcendental Philosophy, for both a contributory means of support, as well as for his complete intellectual aliment.

Pierre was at first somewhat startled by his exceedingly frank and familiar manner; all old manorial deference for Pierre was clean gone and departed; though at the first shock of their encounter, Charlie could not possibly have known that Pierre was cast off.

'Ha, Pierre! glad to see you, my boy! Hark ye, next month I am to deliver an address before the Omega order of the Apostles. The Grand Master, Plinlimmon, will be there. I have heard on the best authority that he once said of me—"That youth has the Primitive Categories in him; he is destined to astonish the world." Why, lad, I have received propositions from the Editors of the Spinozaist to contribute a weekly column to their paper, and you know how very few can understand the Spinozaist; nothing is admitted there but the Ultimate

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text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Graham, Richard (fl.1680-1720)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Rh Transcendentals. Hark now, in your ear; I think of throwing off the Apostolic disguise and coming boldly out; Pierre! I think of stumping the State, and preaching our philosophy to the masses.—When did you arrive in town?'

Spite of all his tribulations, Pierre could not restrain a smile at this highly diverting reception; but well knowing the youth, he did not conclude from this audacious burst of enthusiastic egotism that his heart had at all corroded; for egotism is one thing, and selfishness another. No sooner did Pierre intimate his condition to him, than immediately, Charlie was all earnest and practical kindness; recommended the Apostles' as the best possible lodgment for him,—cheap, snug, and convenient to most public places; he offered to procure a cart and see himself to the transport of Pierre's luggage; but finally thought it best to mount the stairs and show him the vacant rooms. But when these at last were decided upon; and Charlie, all cheerfulness and alacrity, started with Pierre for the hotel, to assist him in the removal; grasping his arm the moment they emerged from the great arched door under the tower of the Apostles'; he instantly launched into his amusing heroics, and continued the strain till the trunks were fairly in sight.

'Lord! my law-business overwhelms me! I must drive away some of my clients; I must have my exercise, and this ever-growing business denies it to me. Besides, I owe something to the sublime cause of the general humanity; I must displace some of my briefs for my metaphysical treatises. I cannot waste all my oil over bonds and mortgages.—You said you were married, I think?'

But without stopping for any reply, he rattled on. 'Well, I suppose it is wise after all. It settles, centralises,

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392 and confirms a man, I have heard.—No, I didn't; it is a random thought of my own, that!—Yes, it makes the world definite to him; it removes his morbid subjectiveness, and makes all things objective; nine small children, for instance, may be considered objective. Marriage, hey!—A fine thing, no doubt, no doubt:—domestic—pretty—nice, all round. But I owe something to the world, my boy! By marriage, I might contribute to the population of men, but not to the census of mind. The great men are all bachelors, you know. Their family is the universe: I should say the planet Saturn was their elder son; and Plato their uncle.—So you are married?'

But again, reckless of answers, Charlie went on. 'Pierre, a thought, my boy;—a thought for you! You do not say it, but you hint of a low purse. Now I shall help you to fill it—Stump the State on the Kantian Philosophy! A dollar a head, my boy! Pass round your beaver, and you'll get it. I have every confidence in the penetration and magnanimousness of the people! Pierre, hark in your ear;—it's my opinion the world is all wrong. Hist, I say—an entire mistake. Society demands an Avatar,—a Curtius, my boy! to leap into the fiery gulf, and by perishing himself, save the whole empire of men! Pierre, I have long renounced the allurements of life and fashion. Look at my coat, and see how I spurn them! Pierre! but, stop, have you ever a shilling? Let's take a cold cut here—it's a cheap place; I go here sometimes. Come, let's in.'

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 BOOK XXI

PIERRE IMMATURELY ATTEMPTS A MATURE WORK. TIDINGS FROM THE MEADOWS. PLINLIMMON

I

are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three lofty adjoining chambers of the Apostles'. And passing on a little further in time, and overlooking the hundred and one domestic details, of how their internal arrangements were finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly, now giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel, the only practical relief from the memories of her miserable past; how Isabel herself in the otherwise occupied hours of Pierre, passed some of her time in mastering the chirographical incoherencies of his manuscripts, with a view to eventually copying them out in a legible hand for the printer; or went below-stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in the modest and amiable society of the three young ladies and their excellent mother, found some little solace for the absence of Pierre; or, when his day's work was done, sat by him in the twilight, and played her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its wondrous suggestiveness; but alas! eternally incapable of being translated into words; for where the deepest words end, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.

Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning in scorn even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, 5em

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 {| class="_toc"
 * Introduction ||
 * To the Reader ||
 * On New-Year’s Day, 1640. To the King ||
 * Loving and Beloved ||
 * - class=_aux
 * 'If when Don Cupid's dart'||
 * A Session of the Poets ||
 * Love's World ||
 * Sonnets ||
 * To his much Honoured the Lord Lepington, upon his Translation of Malvezzi, his 'Romulus' and 'Tarquin' ||
 * Against Fruition ||
 * 'There never yet was woman made' ||
 * To my Friend Will. Davenant, upon his Poem of 'Madagascar' ||
 * To my Friend Will. Davenant, upon his other Poems ||
 * 'Love, Reason, Hate, did once bespeak' ||
 * Song ||
 * Upon my Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden ||
 * To Mr. Davenant for Absence ||
 * Against Absence ||
 * A Supplement of an Imperfect Copy of Verses of Mr. William Shakespeare's, by the Author ||
 * - class=_aux
 * The Lover's Clock ||
 * ''Tis now, since I sat down before'||
 * Upon my Lord Brohall's Wedding ||
 * 'Sir, whether these lines do find you out' ||
 * Against Fruition ||
 * A Ballad upon a Wedding ||
 * 'My dearest rival, lest our love' ||
 * Song ||
 * Upon Two Sisters ||
 * To his Rival ||
 * }v
 * Song ||
 * Upon my Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden ||
 * To Mr. Davenant for Absence ||
 * Against Absence ||
 * A Supplement of an Imperfect Copy of Verses of Mr. William Shakespeare's, by the Author ||
 * - class=_aux
 * The Lover's Clock ||
 * ''Tis now, since I sat down before'||
 * Upon my Lord Brohall's Wedding ||
 * 'Sir, whether these lines do find you out' ||
 * Against Fruition ||
 * A Ballad upon a Wedding ||
 * 'My dearest rival, lest our love' ||
 * Song ||
 * Upon Two Sisters ||
 * To his Rival ||
 * }v
 * 'Sir, whether these lines do find you out' ||
 * Against Fruition ||
 * A Ballad upon a Wedding ||
 * 'My dearest rival, lest our love' ||
 * Song ||
 * Upon Two Sisters ||
 * To his Rival ||
 * }v
 * Song ||
 * Upon Two Sisters ||
 * To his Rival ||
 * }v
 * To his Rival ||
 * }v

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Rh

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text: Author:Moira K. Coyle

title: Author:Moira K. Coyle


text:
User:Asanagi

Please leave your comment at my Japanese talk page.

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User talk:Asanagi

Please leave your comment at my Japanese talk page.

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text: Index:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 1 (1897).djvu


text: Index:The Catholic encyclopedia and its makers.djvu


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User talk:71.215.192.55

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User talk:Artemoderno

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Page:Pierre.djvu/408

394 which, written at Saddle Meadows in the sweet legendary time of Lucy and her love, he had jealously kept from the publishers, as too true and good to be published; renouncing all his foregone self, Pierre was now engaged in a comprehensive compacted work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous motives unitedly impelled;—the burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the sale of his book, he could realise money. Swayed to universality of thought by the widely explosive mental tendencies of the profound events which had lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that most grand productions of the best human intellects ever are built round a circle, as atolls (i.e. the primitive coral islets which, raising themselves in the depths of profoundest seas, rise funnel-like to the surface, and present there a hoop of white rock, which though on the outside everywhere lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet lagoon within), digestively including the whole range of all that can be known or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book, which the world should hail with surprise and delight. A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course of the multifarious, incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilised young inquirer after Truth; this poured one considerable contributory stream into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all mere reading is apt to prove

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Rh but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not an accelerator helpingly pushing him along.

While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one of the stages of the transition. That ultimate element once fairly gained, then books no more are needed for buoys to our souls; our own strong limbs support us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a jeering impunity. He did not see,—or if he did, he could not yet name the true cause for it,—that already, in the incipiency of his work, the heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge would not congenially weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal airiness of spontaneous creative thought. He would climb Parnassus with a pile of folios on his back. He did not see, that it was nothing at all to him, what other men had written; that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him (Pierre), so long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently great. He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and then,—without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it any way,—thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him. He did not see, that even when thus combined, all was but one small mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and inexhaustibility in himself; that all the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors,

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396 distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be, if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not at its reflection.

But, as to the resolute traveller in Switzerland, the Alps do never in one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously reveal their full awfulness of amplitude—their overawing extent of peak crowded on peak, and spur sloping on spur, and chain jammed behind chain, and all their wonderful battalionings of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that on first entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at once perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such an encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost snows. Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God, does man come at last to gain his Mont Blanc and take an overtopping view of these Alps; and even then, the tithe is not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the Rocky Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself!

But not now to consider these ulterior things, Pierre, though strangely and very newly alive to many before unregarded wonders in the general world; still, had he not as yet procured for himself that enchanter's wand of the soul, which but touching the humblest experiences in one's life, straightway it starts up all eyes, in every one of which are endless significances. Not yet had he dropped his angle into the well of his childhood, to find what fish might be there; for who dreams to find fish in a well? the running stream of the outer world, there doubtless swim the golden perch and the pickerel! Ten million things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to

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Rh unwrap this Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!

II

He had been engaged some weeks upon his book—in pursuance of his settled plan avoiding all contact with any of his city-connections or friends, even as in his social downfall they sedulously avoided seeking him out—nor ever once going or sending to the post-office, though it was but a little round the corner from where he was, since having dispatched no letters himself, he expected none; thus isolated from the world, and intent upon his literary enterprise, Pierre had passed some weeks, when verbal tidings came to him, of three most momentous events.

First: his mother was dead.

Second: all Saddle Meadows was become Glen Stanly's.

Third: Glen Stanly was believed to be the suitor of Lucy; who, convalescent from an almost mortal illness, was now dwelling at her mother's house in town.

It was chiefly the first-mentioned of these events which darted a sharp natural anguish into Pierre. No letter had come to him; no smallest ring or memorial been sent him; no slightest mention made of him in the will;

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398 and yet it was reported that an inconsolable grief had induced his mother's mortal malady, and driven her at length into insanity, which suddenly terminated in death; and when he first heard of that event, she had been cold in the ground for twenty-five days.

How plainly did all this speak of the equally immense pride and grief of his once magnificent mother; and how agonisedly now did it hint of her mortally wounded love for her only and best-beloved Pierre! In vain he reasoned with himself; in vain remonstrated with himself; in vain sought to parade all his stoic arguments to drive off the onslaught of natural passion. Nature prevailed; and with tears that like acid burned and scorched as they flowed, he wept, he raved, at the bitter loss of his parent; whose eyes had been closed by unrelated hands that were hired; but whose heart had been broken, and whose very reason been ruined, by the related hands of her son.

For some interval it almost seemed as if his own heart would snap; his own reason go down. Unendurable grief of a man, when Death itself gives the stab, and then snatches all availments to solacement away. For in the grave is no help, no prayer thither may go, no forgiveness thence come; so that the penitent whose sad victim lies in the ground, for that useless penitent his doom is eternal, and though it be Christmas-day with all Christendom, with him it is Hell-day and an eaten liver forever.

With what marvellous precision and exactitude he now went over in his mind all the minutest details of his old joyous life with his mother at Saddle Meadows. He began with his own toilet in the morning; then his mild stroll into the fields; then his cheerful return to call his mother in her chamber; then the gay breakfast—and so on, and on, all through the sweet day, till mother and

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Rh son kissed, and with light, loving hearts separated to their beds, to prepare themselves for still another day of affectionate delight. This recalling of innocence and joy in the hour of remorsefulness and woe; this is as heating red-hot the pincers that tear us. But in this delirium of his soul, Pierre could not define where that line was, which separated the natural grief for the loss of a parent from that other one which was born of compunction. He strove hard to define it, but could not. He tried to cozen himself into believing that all his grief was but natural, or if there existed any other, that must spring—not from the consciousness of having done any possible wrong—but from the pang at what terrible cost the more exalted virtues are gained. Nor did he wholly fail in this endeavour. At last he dismissed his mother's memory into that same profound vault where hitherto had reposed the swooned form of his Lucy. But, as sometimes men are coffined in a trance, being thereby mistaken for dead; so it is possible to bury a tranced grief in the soul, erroneously supposing that it hath no more vitality of suffering. Now, immortal things only can beget immortality. It would almost seem one presumptive argument for the endless duration of the human soul, that it is impossible in time and space to kill any compunction arising from having cruelly injured a departed fellow-being.

Ere he finally committed his mother to the profoundest vault of his soul, fain would he have drawn one poor alleviation from a circumstance, which nevertheless, impartially viewed, seemed equally capable either of soothing or intensifying his grief. His mother's will, which without the least mention of his own name, bequeathed several legacies to her friends, and concluded by leaving all Saddle Meadows and its rent-rolls to Glendinning Stanly; this will bore the date of the day immediately

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400 succeeding his fatal announcement on the landing of the stairs, of his assumed nuptials with Isabel. It plausibly pressed upon him, that as all the evidences of his mother's dying unrelentingness toward him were negative; and the only positive evidence—so to speak—of even that negativeness, was the will which omitted all mention of Pierre; therefore, as that will bore so significant a date, it must needs be most reasonable to conclude, that it was dictated in the not yet subsided transports of his mother's first indignation. But small consolation was this, when he considered the final insanity of his mother; for whence that insanity but from a hate-grief unrelenting, even as his father must have become insane from a sin-grief irreparable? Nor did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail to impress his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate—his own hereditary liability to madness. Presentiment, I say; but what is a presentiment? how shall you coherently define a presentiment, or how make anything out of it which is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is but a judgment in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet possessing this preternaturalness of prophecy, how then shall you escape the fateful conclusion, that you are helplessly held in the six hands of the Sisters? For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet how foreknow and dread in one breath, unless with this divine seeming power of prescience, you blend the actual slimy powerlessness of defence?

That his cousin, Glen Stanly, had been chosen by his mother to inherit the domain of the Meadows, was not entirely surprising to Pierre. Not only had Glen always been a favourite with his mother by reason of his superb person and his congeniality of worldly views with herself, but excepting only Pierre, he was her nearest surviving blood relation; and moreover, in his Christian name,

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Rh bore the hereditary syllables, Glendinning. So that if to anyone but Pierre the Meadows must descend, Glen, on these general grounds, seemed the appropriate heir.

But it is not natural for a man, never mind who he may be, to see a noble patrimony, rightfully his, go over to a soul-alien, and that alien once his rival in love, and now his heartless, sneering foe; for so Pierre could not but now argue of Glen; it is not natural for a man to see this without singular emotions of discomfort and hate. Nor in Pierre were these feelings at all soothed by the report of Glen's renewed attentions to Lucy. For there is something in the breast of almost every man, which at bottom takes offence at the attentions of any other man offered to a woman, the hope of whose nuptial love he himself may have discarded. Fain would a man selfishly appropriate all the hearts which have ever in any way confessed themselves his. Besides, in Pierre's case, this resentment was heightened by Glen's previous hypocritical demeanour. For now all his suspicions seemed abundantly verified; and comparing all dates, he inferred that Glen's visit to Europe had only been undertaken to wear off the pang of his rejection by Lucy, a rejection tacitly consequent upon her not denying her affianced relation to Pierre.

But now, under the mask of profound sympathy—in time, ripening into love—for a most beautiful girl, ruffianly deserted by her betrothed, Glen could afford to be entirely open in his new suit, without at all exposing his old scar to the world. So at least it now seemed to Pierre. Moreover, Glen could now approach Lucy under the most favourable possible auspices. He could approach her as a deeply sympathising friend, all wishful to assuage her sorrow, but hinting nothing, at present, of any selfish matrimonial intent; by enacting this prudent and unclamorous part, the mere sight of such tranquil, disinterested, but indestructible devotedness,

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402 could not but suggest in Lucy's mind, very natural comparisons between Glen and Pierre, most deplorably abasing to the latter. Then, no woman—as it would sometimes seem—no woman is utterly free from the influence of a princely social position in her suitor, especially if he be handsome and young. And Glen would come to her now the master of two immense fortunes, and the heir, by voluntary election, no less than by blood propinquity, to the ancestral bannered hall, and the broad manorial meadows of the Glendinnings. And thus, too, the spirit of Pierre's own mother would seem to press Glen's suit. Indeed, situated now as he was, Glen would seem all the finest part of Pierre, without any of Pierre's shame; would almost seem Pierre himself—what Pierre had once been to Lucy. And as in the case of a man who has lost a sweet wife, and who long refuses the least consolation; as this man at last finds a singular solace in the companionship of his wife's sister, who happens to bear a peculiar family resemblance to the dead; and as he, in the end, proposes marriage to this sister, merely from the force of such magical associative influences; so it did not seem wholly out of reason to suppose, that the great manly beauty of Glen, possessing a strong related similitude to Pierre's, might raise in Lucy's heart associations, which would lead her at least to seek—if she could not find—solace for one now regarded as dead and gone to her forever, in the devotedness of another, who would notwithstanding almost seem as that dead one brought back to life.

Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.

As Pierre conjured up this phantom of Glen transformed into the seeming semblance of himself; as he figured it

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Rh advancing toward Lucy and raising her hand in devotion; an infinite quenchless rage and malice possessed him. Many commingled emotions combined to provoke this storm. But chief of all was something strangely akin to that indefinable detestation which one feels for any impostor who has dared to assume one's own name and aspect in any equivocal or dishonourable affair; an emotion greatly intensified if this impostor be known for a mean villain at bottom, and also, by the freak of nature, to be almost the personal duplicate of the man whose identity he assumes. All these and a host of other distressful and resentful fancies now ran through the breast of Pierre. All his Faith-born, enthusiastic, high-wrought, stoic, and philosophic defences, were now beaten down by this sudden storm of nature in his soul. For there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. Then all the fair philosophic or Faith-phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophisings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.

While this mood was on him, Pierre cursed himself for a heartless villain and an idiot fool;—heartless villain, as the murderer of his mother—idiot fool, because he had thrown away all his felicity; because he had himself, as it were, resigned his noble birthright to a cunning kinsman for a mess of pottage, which now proved all but ashes in his mouth.

Resolved to hide these new, and—as it latently seemed to him—unworthy pangs, from Isabel, as also their cause, he quitted his chamber, intending a long vagabond stroll in the suburbs of the town, to wear off his sharper grief, ere he should again return into her sight.

title: Page:Pierre.djvu/417


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User talk:77.103.219.123

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User talk:110.226.212.137

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Page:Pierre.djvu/418

404 III

As Pierre, now hurrying from his chamber, was rapidly passing through one of the higher brick colonnades connecting the ancient building with the modern, there advanced toward him from the direction of the latter, a very plain, composed, manly figure, with a countenance rather pale if anything, but quite clear and without wrinkle. Though the brow and the beard, and the steadiness of the head and settledness of the step indicated mature age, yet the blue, bright, but still quiescent eye offered a very striking contrast. In that eye, the gay immortal youth Apollo, seemed enshrined; while on that ivory-throned brow, old Saturn cross-legged sat. The whole countenance of this man, the whole air and look of this man, expressed a cheerful content. Cheerful is the adjective, for it was the contrary of gloom; content—perhaps acquiescence—is the substantive, for it was not Happiness or Delight. But while the personal look and air of this man were thus winning, there was still something latently visible in him which repelled. That something may best be characterised as non-Benevolence. Non-Benevolence seems the best word, for it was neither Malice nor Ill-will; but something passive. To crown all, a certain floating atmosphere seemed to invest and go along with this man. That atmosphere seems only renderable in words by the term Inscrutableness. Though the clothes worn by this man were strictly in accordance with the general style of any unobtrusive gentleman's dress, yet his clothes seemed to disguise this man. One would almost have said, his very face, the apparently natural glance of his very eye, disguised this man.

Now, as this person deliberately passed by Pierre, he lifted his hat, gracefully bowed, smiled gently, and passed

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 on. But Pierre was all confusion; he flushed, looked askance, stammered with his hand at his hat to return the courtesy of the other; he seemed thoroughly upset by the mere sight of this hat-lifting, gracefully bowing, gently smiling, and most miraculously self-possessed, non-benevolent man.

Now who was this man? This man was Plotinus Plinlimmon. Pierre had read a treatise of his in a stage-coach coming to the city, and had heard him often spoken of by Millthorpe and others as the Grand Master of a certain mystic Society among the Apostles. Whence he came, no one could tell. His surname was Welsh, but he was a Tennesseean by birth. He seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort. He never was known to work with his hands; never to write with his hands (he would not even write a letter); he never was known to open a book. There were no books in his chamber. Nevertheless, some day or other he must have read books, but that time seemed gone now; as for the sleazy works that went under his name, they were nothing more than his verbal things, taken down at random, and bunglingly methodised by his young disciples.

Finding Plinlimmon thus unfurnished either with books or pen and paper, and imputing it to something like indigence, a foreign scholar, a rich nobleman, who chanced to meet him once, sent him a fine supply of stationery, with a very fine set of volumes,—Cardan, Epictetus, the Book of Mormon, Abraham Tucker, Condorcet and the Zenda-Vesta. But this noble foreign scholar calling next day—perhaps in expectation of some compliment for his great kindness—started aghast at his own package deposited just without the door of Plinlimmon, and with all fastenings untouched.

'Missent,' said Plotinus Plinlimmon placidly: 'if anything, I looked for some choice Curaçoa from a nobleman

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text:
User talk:206.188.238.184

Welcome

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Twice through the mill
We have had to revert your edits multiple times on [Grimm's Household Tales (Edwardes)/The Golden Goose]]. The work we present was as what was published in Edwardes rendition of the work. If you see errors in our work against the published version then please make the corrections, and suitably comment and reference your source. Thanks. — billinghurst  sDrewth  03:22, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

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text:
User talk:70.55.101.148

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text:
User talk:96.255.101.50

Welcome

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Thanks for your revision the other day. — billinghurst  sDrewth  03:23, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

title: User talk:96.255.101.50


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Page:Pierre.djvu/420

406 like you. I should be very happy, my dear Count, to accept a few jugs of choice Curaçoa.'

'I thought that the society of which you are the head, excluded all things of that sort,' replied the Count.

'Dear Count, so they do; but Mohammed hath his own dispensation.'

'Ah! I see,' said the noble scholar archly.

'I am afraid you do not see, dear Count,' said Plinlimmon; and instantly before the eyes of the Count, the inscrutable atmosphere eddied and eddied round about this Plotinus Plinlimmon.

His chance brushing encounter in the corridor was the first time that ever Pierre had without medium beheld the form or the face of Plinlimmon. Very early after taking chambers at the Apostles', he had been struck by a steady observant blue-eyed countenance at one of the loftiest windows of the old gray tower, which on the opposite side of the quadrangular space, rose prominently before his own chamber. Only through two panes of glass—his own and the stranger's—had Pierre hitherto beheld that remarkable face of repose,—repose neither divine nor human, nor anything made up of either of both—but a repose separate and apart—a repose of a face by itself. One adequate look at that face conveyed to most philosophical observers a notion of something not before included in their scheme of the Universe.

Now as to the mild sun, glass is no hindrance at all, but he transmits his light and life through the glass; even so through Pierre's panes did the tower face transmit its strange mystery.

Becoming more and more interested in this face, he had questioned Millthorpe concerning it. 'Bless your soul,' replied Millthorpe—'that is Plotinus Plinlimmon! our Grand Master, Plotinus Plinlimmon! By gad, you must know Plotinus thoroughly, as I have long done.

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text:
User talk:67.100.127.186

Welcome

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Page:Pierre.djvu/421

Rh Come away with me, now, and let me introduce you instanter to Plotinus Plinlimmon.'

But Pierre declined; and could not help thinking, that though in all human probability Plotinus well understood Millthorpe, yet Millthorpe could hardly yet have wound himself into Plotinus;—though indeed Plotinus—who at times was capable of assuming a very off-hand, confidential, and simple, sophomorean air—might, for reasons best known to himself, have tacitly pretended to Millthorpe, that he (Millthorpe) had thoroughly wriggled himself into his (Plotinus') innermost soul.

A man will be given a book, and when the donor's back is turned, will carelessly drop it in the first corner; he is not over-anxious to be bothered with the book. But now personally point out to him the author, and ten to one he goes back to the corner, picks up the book, dusts the cover, and very carefully reads that invaluable work. One does not vitally believe in a man till one's own two eyes have beheld him. If then, by the force of peculiar circumstances, Pierre while in the stage, had formerly been drawn into an attentive perusal of the work on 'Chronometricals and Horologicals'; how then was his original interest heightened by catching a subsequent glimpse of the author. But at the first reading, not being able—as he thought—to master the pivot-idea of the pamphlet; and as every incomprehended idea is not only a perplexity but a taunting reproach to one's mind, Pierre had at last ceased studying it altogether; nor consciously troubled himself further about it during the remainder of the journey. But still thinking now it might possibly have been mechanically retained by him, he searched all the pockets of his clothes, but without success. He begged Millthorpe to do his best toward procuring him another copy; but it proved impossible to find one. Plotinus himself could not furnish it.

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text:
User talk:205.213.112.66

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Page:Pierre.djvu/422

408 Among other efforts, Pierre in person had accosted a limping half-deaf old book-stall man, not very far from the Apostles'. 'Have you the "Chronometrics," my friend?' forgetting the exact title.

'Very bad, very bad!' said the old man, rubbing his back;—'has had the chronic-rheumatics ever so long; what's good for 'em?'

Perceiving his mistake, Pierre replied that he did not know what was the infallible remedy.

'Whist! let me tell ye, then, young 'un,' said the old cripple, limping close up to him, and putting his mouth in Pierre's ear—'Never catch 'em!—now's the time, while you're young:—never catch 'em!'

By and by the blue-eyed, mystic-mild face in the upper window of the old gray tower began to domineer in a very remarkable manner upon Pierre. When in his moods of peculiar depression and despair; when dark thoughts of his miserable condition would steal over him; and black doubts as to the integrity of his unprecedented course in life would most malignantly suggest themselves; when a thought of the vanity of his deep book would glidingly intrude; if glancing at his closet-window that mystic-mild face met Pierre's; under any of these influences the effect was surprising, and not to be adequately detailed in any possible words.

Vain! vain! vain! said the face to him. Fool! fool! fool! said the face to him. Quit! quit! quit! said the face to him. But when he mentally interrogated the face as to why it thrice said Vain! Fool! Quit! to him; here there was no response. For that face did not respond to anything. Did I not say before that that face was something separate, and apart; a face by itself? Now, anything which is thus a thing by itself never responds to any other thing. If to affirm, be to expand one's isolated self; and if to deny, be to contract

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Rh one's isolated self; then to respond is a suspension of all isolation. Though this face in the tower was so clear and so mild; though the gay youth Apollo was enshrined in that eye, and paternal old Saturn sat cross-legged on that ivory brow; yet somehow to Pierre the face at last wore a sort of malicious leer to him. But the Kantists might say, that this was a subjective sort of leer in Pierre. Anyway, the face seemed to leer upon Pierre. And now it said to him—''Ass! ass! ass!'' This expression was insufferable. He procured some muslin for his closet-window; and the face became curtained like any portrait. But this did not mend the leer. Pierre knew that still the face leered behind the muslin. What was most terrible was the idea that by some magical means or other the face had got hold of his secret. 'Ay,' shuddered Pierre, 'the face knows that Isabel is not my wife! And that seems the reason it leers.'

Then would all manner of wild fancyings float through his soul, and detached sentences of the 'Chronometrics' would vividly recur to him—sentences before but imperfectly comprehended, but now shedding a strange, baleful light upon his peculiar condition, and emphatically denouncing it. Again he tried his best to procure the pamphlet, to read it now by the commentary of the mystic-mild face; again he searched through the pockets of his clothes for the stage-coach copy, but in vain.

And when—at the critical moment of quitting his chambers that morning of the receipt of the fatal tidings—the face itself—the man himself—this inscrutable Plotinus Plinlimmon himself—did visibly brush by him in the brick corridor, and all the trepidation he had ever before felt at the mild-mystic aspect in the tower window, now redoubled upon him, so that, as before said, he flushed, looked askance, and stammered with his saluting hand to his hat;—then anew did there burn in him the desire

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text: Grimm's Household Tales (Edwardes)/The Golden Goose


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410 of procuring the pamphlet. 'Cursed fate that I should have lost it,' he cried;—'more cursed, that when I did have it, and did read it, I was such a ninny as not to comprehend; and now it is all too late!'

Yet—to anticipate here—when years after, an old Jew clothesman rummaged over a surtout of Pierre's—which by some means had come into his hands—his lynx-like fingers happened to feel something foreign between the cloth and the heavy quilted bombazine lining. He ripped open the skirt, and found several old pamphlet pages, soft and worn almost to tissue, but still legible enough to reveal the title—'Chronometricals and Horologicals.' Pierre must have ignorantly thrust it into his pocket, in the stage, and it had worked through a rent there, and worked its way clean down into the skirt, and there helped pad the padding. So that all the time he was hunting for this pamphlet, he himself was wearing the pamphlet. When he brushed past Plinlimmon in the brick corridor, and felt that renewed intense longing for the pamphlet, then his right hand was not two inches from the pamphlet.

Possibly this curious circumstance may in some sort illustrate his self-supposed non-understanding of the pamphlet, as first read by him in the stage. Could he likewise have carried about with him in his mind the thorough understanding of the book, and yet not be aware that he so understood it? I think that, regarded in one light, the final career of Pierre will seem to show, that he did understand it. And here it may be randomly suggested, by way of bagatelle, whether some things that men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.

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text:
User talk:222.152.105.136

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text:
Page:Pierre.djvu/425

 BOOK XXII

THE FLOWER-CURTAIN LIFTED FROM BEFORE A TROPICAL AUTHOR, WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL FLESH-BRUSH PHILOSOPHY

I

days passed after the fatal tidings from the Meadows, and at length, somewhat mastering his emotions, Pierre again sits down in his chamber; for grieve how he will, yet work he must. And now day succeeds day, and week follows week, and Pierre still sits in his chamber. The long rows of cooled brick-kilns around him scarce know of the change; but from the fair fields of his great-great-great-grandfather's manor, Summer hath flown like a swallow-guest; the perfidious wight, Autumn, hath peeped in at the groves of the maple, and under pretence of clothing them in rich russet and gold, hath stripped them at last of the slightest rag, and then ran away laughing; prophetic icicles depend from the arbours round about the old manorial mansion—now locked up and abandoned; and the little, round, marble table in the viny summer-house where, of July mornings, he had sat chatting and drinking negus with his gay mother, is now spread with a shivering napkin of frost; sleety varnish hath encrusted that once gay mother's grave, preparing it for its final cerements of wrapping snow upon snow; wild howl the winds in the woods: it is Winter. Sweet Summer is done; and Autumn is done; but the book, like the bitter Winter, is yet to be finished.

That season's wheat is long garnered, Pierre; that 5em

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412 season's ripe apples and grapes are in; no crop, no plant, no fruit is out; the whole harvest is done. Oh, woe to that belated winter-overtaken plant, which the summer could not bring to maturity! The drifting winter snows shall whelm it. Think, Pierre, doth not thy plant belong to some other and tropical clime? Though transplanted to northern Maine, the orange-tree of the Floridas will put forth leaves in that parsimonious summer, and show some few tokens of fruitage; yet November will find no golden globes thereon; and the passionate old lumberman, December, shall peel the whole tree, wrench it off at the ground, and toss it for a faggot to some lime-kiln. Ah, Pierre, Pierre, make haste! make haste! force thy fruitage, lest the winter force thee.

Watch yon little toddler, how long it is learning to stand by itself! First it shrieks and implores, and will not try to stand at all, unless both father and mother uphold it; then a little more bold, it must, at least, feel one parental hand, else again the cry and the tremble; long time is it ere by degrees this child comes to stand without any support. But, by and by, grown up to man's estate, it shall leave the very mother that bore it, and the father that begot it, and cross the seas, perhaps, or settle in far Oregon lands. There now, do you see the soul. In its germ on all sides it is closely folded by the world, as the husk folds the tenderest fruit; then it is born from the world-husk, but still now outwardly clings to it;—still clamours for the support of its mother the world, and its father the Deity. But it shall yet learn to stand independent, though not without many a bitter wail, and many a miserable fall.

That hour of the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest. There is

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Rh still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan. Divinity and humanity then are equally willing that he should starve in the street for all that either will do for him. Now cruel father and mother have both let go his hand, and the little soul-toddler, now you shall hear his shriek and his wail, and often his fall.

When at Saddle Meadows, Pierre had wavered and trembled in those first wretched hours ensuing upon the receipt of Isabel's letter; then humanity had let go the hand of Pierre, and therefore his cry; but when at last inured to this, Pierre was seated at his book, willing that humanity should desert him, so long as he thought he felt a far higher support; then, ere long, he began to feel the utter loss of that other support, too; ay, even the paternal gods themselves did now desert Pierre; the toddler was toddling entirely alone, and not without shrieks.

If man must wrestle, perhaps it is well that it should be on the nakedest possible plain.

The three chambers of Pierre at the Apostles' were connecting ones. The first—having a little retreat where Delly slept—was used for the more exacting domestic purposes: here also their meals were taken; the second was the chamber of Isabel; the third was the closet of Pierre. In the first—the dining-room, as they called it—there was a stove which boiled the water for their coffee and tea, and where Delly concocted their light repasts. This was their only fire; for, warned again and again to economise to the uttermost, Pierre did not dare to purchase any additional warmth. But by prudent management, a very little warmth may go a great way. In the present case, it went some forty feet or more. A horizontal pipe, after elbowing away from above the stove

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414 in the dining-room, pierced the partition wall, and passing straight through Isabel's chamber, entered the closet of Pierre at one corner, and then abruptly disappeared into the wall, where all further caloric—if any—went up through the chimney into the air, to help warm the December sun. Now, the great distance of Pierre's calorical stream from its fountain, sadly impaired it, and weakened it. It hardly had the flavour of heat. It would have had but very inconsiderable influence in raising the depressed spirits of the most mercurial thermometer; certainly it was not very elevating to the spirits of Pierre. Besides, this calorical stream, small as it was, did not flow through the room, but only entered it, to elbow right out of it, as some coquettish maidens enter the heart; moreover, it was in the furthest corner from the only place where, with a judicious view to the light, Pierre's desk-barrels and board could advantageously stand. Often, Isabel insisted upon his having a separate stove to himself; but Pierre would not listen to such a thing. Then Isabel would offer her own room to him; saying it was of no indispensable use to her by day; she could easily spend her time in the dining-room; but Pierre would not listen to such a thing; he would not deprive her of the comfort of a continually accessible privacy; besides, he was now used to his own room, and must sit by that particular window there, and no other. Then Isabel would insist upon keeping her connecting door open while Pierre was employed at his desk, that so the heat of her room might bodily go into his; but Pierre would not listen to such a thing; because he must be religiously locked up while at work; outer love and hate must alike be excluded then. In vain Isabel said she would make not the slightest noise, and muffle the point of the very needle she used. All in vain. Pierre was inflexible here.

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Rh Yes, he was resolved to battle it out in his own solitary closet; though a strange, transcendental conceit of one of the more erratic and non-conforming Apostles,—who was also at this time engaged upon a profound work above-stairs, and who denied himself his full sufficiency of food, in order to ensure an abundant fire;—the strange conceit of this Apostle, I say,—accidentally communicated to Pierre,—that, through all the kingdoms of Nature, caloric was the great universal producer and vivifyer, and could not be prudently excluded from the spot where great books were in the act of creation; and therefore, he (the Apostle) for one, was resolved to plant his head in a hot-bed of stove-warmed air, and so force his brain to germinate and blossom, and bud, and put forth the eventual, crowning, victorious flower;—though indeed this conceit rather staggered Pierre—for in truth, there was no small smack of plausible analogy in it—yet one thought of his purse would wholly expel the unwelcome intrusion, and reinforce his own previous resolve.

However lofty and magnificent the movements of the stars: whatever celestial melodies they may thereby beget; yet the astronomers assure us that they are the most rigidly methodical of all the things that exist. No old housewife goes her daily domestic round with one-millionth part the precision of the great planet Jupiter in his stated and unalterable revolutions. He has found his orbit, and stays in it; he has timed himself, and adheres to his periods. So, in some degree with Pierre, now revolving in the troubled orbit of his book.

Pierre rose moderately early; and the better to inure himself to the permanent chill of his room, and to defy and beard to its face, the cruellest cold of the outer air; he would—behind the curtain—throw down the upper sash of his window; and on a square of old painted canvas, formerly wrapping some bale of goods in the

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text:
User talk:24.150.225.108

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416 neighbourhood, treat his limbs, of those early December mornings, to a copious ablution, in water thickened with incipient ice. Nor, in this stoic performance, was he at all without company,—not present, but adjoiningly sympathetic; for scarce an Apostle in all those scores and scores of chambers, but undeviatingly took his daily December bath. Pierre had only to peep out of his pane and glance round the multi-windowed, enclosing walls of the quadrangle, to catch plentiful half-glimpses, all round him, of many a lean, philosophical nudity, refreshing his meagre bones with crash-towel and cold water. 'Quick be the play,' was their motto: 'Lively our elbows, and nimble all our tenuities.' Oh, the dismal echoings of the raspings of flesh-brushes, perverted to the filing and polishing of the merest ribs! Oh, the shuddersome splashings of pails of ice-water over feverish heads, not unfamiliar with aches! Oh, the rheumatical cracklings of rusted joints, in that defied air of December! for every thick-frosted sash was down, and every lean nudity courted the zephyr!

Among all the innate, hyena-like repellants to the reception of any set form of a spiritually minded and pure archetypical faith, there is nothing so potent in its sceptical tendencies, as that inevitable perverse ridiculousness, which so often bestreaks some of the essentially finest and noblest aspirations of those men, who disgusted with the common conventional quackeries, strive, in their clogged terrestrial humanities, after some imperfectly discerned, but heavenly ideals: ideals, not only imperfectly discerned in themselves, but the path to them so little traceable, that no two minds will entirely agree upon it.

Hardly a new-light Apostle, but who, in superaddition to his revolutionary scheme for the minds and philosophies of men, entertains some insane, heterodoxical notions about the economy of his body. His soul,

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Rh introduced by the gentlemanly gods into the supernal society, practically rejects that most sensible maxim of men of the world, who chancing to gain the friendship of any great character, never make that the ground of boring him with the supplemental acquaintance of their next friend, who perhaps is some miserable ninny. Love me, love my dog, is only an adage for the old country women who affectionately kiss their cows. The gods love the soul of a man; often, they will frankly accost it; but they abominate his body; and will forever cut it dead, both here and hereafter. So, if thou wouldst go to the gods, leave thy dog of a body behind thee. And most impotently thou strivest with thy purifying cold baths, and thy diligent scrubbings with flesh-brushes, to prepare it as a meet offering for their altar. Nor shall all thy Pythagorean and Shelleyan dietings on apple-parings, dried prunes, and crumbs of oatmeal cracker, ever fit thy body for heaven. Feed all things with food convenient for them—that is, if the food be procurable. The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of thy body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be. Say, wouldst thou rise with a lantern jaw and a spavined knee? Rise with brawn on thee, and a most royal corporation before thee; so shalt thou in that day claim respectful attention. Know this: that while many a consumptive dietarian has but produced the merest literary flatulencies to the world; convivial authors have alike given utterance to the sublimest wisdom, and created the least gross and most ethereal forms. And for men of demonstrative muscle and action, consider that right royal epitaph which Cyrus the Great caused to be engraved on his tomb—'I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good.' Ah, foolish!

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418 to think that by starving thy body, thou shalt fatten thy soul! Is yonder ox fatted because yonder lean fox starves in the winter wood? And prate not of despising thy body, while still thou flourisheth thy flesh-brush! The finest houses are most cared for within; the outer walls are freely left to the dust and the soot. Put venison in thee, and so wit shall come out of thee. It is one thing in the mill, but another in the sack.

Now it was the continual, quadrangular example of those forlorn fellows, the Apostles, who, in this period of his half-developments and transitions, had deluded Pierre into the Flesh-Brush Philosophy, and had almost tempted him into the Apple-Parings Dialectics. For all the long wards, corridors, and multitudinous chambers of the Apostles' were scattered with the stems of apples, the stones of prunes, and the shells of pea-nuts. They went about huskily muttering the Kantian Categories through teeth and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with the crumbs of Graham crackers. A tumbler of cold water was the utmost welcome to their reception rooms; at the grand supposed Sanhedrim presided over by one of the deputies of Plotinus Plinlimmon, a huge jug of Adam's Ale, and a bushel-basket of Graham crackers were the only convivials. Continually bits of cheese were dropping from their pockets, and old shiny apple parchments were ignorantly exhibited every time they drew out a manuscript to read you. Some were curious in the vintages of waters; and in three glass decanters set before you, Fairmount, Croton, and Cochituate; they held that Croton was the most potent, Fairmount a gentle tonic, and Cochituate the mildest and least inebriating of all. Take some more of the Croton, my dear sir! Be brisk with the Fairmount! Why stops that Cochituate? So on their philosophical tables went round their Port, their Sherry, and their Claret.

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Rh Some, further advanced, rejected mere water in the bath, as altogether too coarse an element; and so, took to the Vapour-baths, and steamed their lean ribs every morning. The smoke which issued from their heads, and overspread their pages, was prefigured in the mists that issued from under their door-sills and out of their windows. Some could not sit down of a morning until after first applying the Vapour-bath outside, and then thoroughly rinsing out their interiors with five cups of cold Croton. They were as faithfully replenished fire-buckets; and could they, standing in one cordon, have consecutively pumped themselves into each other, then the great fire of 1835 had been far less wide-spread and disastrous.

Ah! ye poor lean ones! ye wretched Soakites and Vapourites! have not your niggardly fortunes enough rinsed ye out, and wizened ye, but ye must still be dragging the hose-pipe, and throwing still more cold Croton on yourselves and the world? Ah! attach the screw of your hose-pipe to some fine old butt of Madeira! pump us some sparkling wine into the world! see, see, already, from all eternity, two-thirds of it have lain helplessly soaking!

II

With cheek rather pale, then, and lips rather blue, Pierre sits down to his plank.

But is Pierre packed in the mail for St. Petersburg this morning? Over his boots are his moccasins; over his ordinary coat is his surtout; and over that, a cloak of Isabel's. Now he is squared to his plank; and at his hint, the affectionate Isabel gently pushes his chair closer to it, for he is so muffled, he can hardly move of himself. Now Delly comes in with bricks hot from the stove; and now Isabel and she with devoted solicitude

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420 pack away these comforting stones in the folds of an old blue cloak, a military garment of the grandfather of Pierre, and tenderly arrange it both over and under his feet; but putting the warm flagging beneath. Then Delly brings still another hot brick to put under his inkstand, to prevent the ink from thickening. Then Isabel drags the camp-bedstead nearer to him, on which are the two or three books he may possibly have occasion to refer to that day, with a biscuit or two, and some water, and a clean towel, and a basin. Then she leans against the plank by the elbow of Pierre, a crook-ended stick. Is Pierre a shepherd, or a bishop, or a cripple? No, but he has in effect, reduced himself to the miserable condition of the last. With the crook-ended cane, Pierre—unable to rise without sadly impairing his manifold intrenchments, and admitting the cold air into their innermost nooks,—Pierre, if in his solitude, he should chance to need anything beyond the reach of his arm, then the crook-ended cane drags it to his immediate vicinity.

Pierre glances slowly all round him; everything seems to be right; he looks up with a grateful, melancholy satisfaction at Isabel; a tear gathers in her eye; but she conceals it from him by coming very close to him, stooping over, and kissing his brow. 'Tis her lips that leave the warm moisture there; not her tears, she says.

'I suppose I must go now, Pierre. Now don't, don't be so long to-day. I will call thee at half-past four. Thou shalt not strain thine eyes in the twilight.'

'We will see about that,' says Pierre, with an unobserved attempt at a very sad pun. 'Come, thou must go. Leave me.'

And there he is left.

Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant,

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Rh overflowing, upbubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap of the Texan Camanche, as at this moment he goes crashing like a wild deer through the green underbrush; I hear his glorious whoop of savage and untamable health; and then I look in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilisation, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your victim!

III

Some hours pass. Let us peep over the shoulder of Pierre, and see what it is he is writing there, in that most melancholy closet. Here, topping the reeking pile by his side, is the last sheet from his hand, the frenzied ink not yet entirely dry. It is much to our purpose; for in this sheet, he seems to have directly plagiarised from his own experiences, to fill out the mood of his apparent author-hero, Vivia, who thus soliloquises: 'A deep-down, unutterable mournfulness is in me. Now I drop all humorous or indifferent disguises, and all philosophical pretensions. I own myself a brother of the clod, a child of the Primeval Gloom. Hopelessness and despair are over me, as pall on pall. Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a tickle. Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot. Tell me not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe cannot spare thee and thy immortality,

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422 so long as—like a hired waiter—thou makest thyself "generally useful." Already the universe gets on without thee, and could still spare a million more of the same identical kidney. Corporations have no souls, and thy Pantheism, what was that? Thou wert but the pretentious, heartless part of a man. Lo! I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from which the meat hath been sucked.'

Here is a slip from the floor.

'Whence flow the panegyrical melodies that precede the march of these heroes? From what but from a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal!'

And here is a second.

'Cast thy eye in there on Vivia; tell me why those four limbs should be clapped in a dismal jail—day out, day in—week out, week in—month out, month in—and himself the voluntary jailor! Is this the end of philosophy? This the larger, and spiritual life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this that a man should grow wise, and leave off his most excellent and calumniated folly?'

And here is a third.

'Cast thy eye in there on Vivia; he, who in the pursuit of the highest health of virtue and truth, shows but a pallid cheek! Weigh his heart in thy hand, oh, thou gold-laced, virtuoso Goethe! and tell me whether it does not exceed thy standard weight!'

And here is a fourth.

'Oh God, that man should spoil and rust on the stalk, and be wilted and threshed ere the harvest hath come! And oh God, that men that call themselves men should still insist on a laugh! I hate the world, and could trample all lungs of mankind as grapes, and heel them out of their breath, to think of the woe and the cant,—to think of the Truth and the Lie! Oh! blessed be the twenty-first day of December, and cursed be the twenty-first day of June!'

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Rh From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has no power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

IV

From eight o'clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room;—eight hours and a half!

From throbbing neck-bands, and swinging belly-bands of gay-hearted horses, the sleigh-bells chimingly jingle;—but Pierre sits there in his room; Thanksgiving comes, with its glad thanks, and crisp turkeys;—but Pierre sits there in his room; soft through the snows, on tinted Indian moccasin, Merry Christmas comes stealing;—but Pierre sits there in his room; it is New Year's, and like a great flagon, the vast city over-brims at all curbstones, wharves, and piers, with bubbling jubilations;—but Pierre sits there in his room:—Nor jingling sleigh-bells at throbbing neck-band, or swinging belly-band; nor glad thanks, and crisp turkeys of Thanksgiving; nor tinted Indian moccasin of Merry Christmas softly stealing through the snows; nor New Year's curb-stones, wharves, and piers, over-brimming with bubbling jubilations:—Nor jingling sleigh-bells, nor glad Thanksgiving, nor Merry Christmas, nor jubilating New Year's:—Nor Bell, Thank, Christ, Year;—none of these are for Pierre. In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time,

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424 Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Piko, stands unassaultable in the midst of waves.

He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. Sometimes the intent ear of Isabel in the next room, overhears the alternate silence, and then the long lonely scratch of his pen. It is as if she heard the busy claw of some midnight mole in the ground. Sometimes she hears a low cough, and sometimes the scrape of his crook-handled cane.

Here surely is a wonderful stillness of eight hours and a half, repeated day after day. In the heart of such silence, surely something is at work. Is it creation, or destruction? Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him?—Unutterable, that a man should be thus!

When in the meridian flush of the day, we recall the black apex of night; then night seems impossible; this sun can never go down. Oh that the memory of the uttermost gloom as an already tasted thing to the dregs, should be no security against its return. One may be passably well one day, but the next, he may sup at black broth with Pluto.

Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?

Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalising of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the

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 within stone-throw of the claim. The other two were up the hill a bit, to right and left, the one on the left a two-roomed bark hut, the other had four rooms, a skillion, and a shed, and whitewashed slab walls, and was called a house—"Mrs. Foster's House," or "Mrs. Foster's Place," or, for short, "the Fosters'." Mrs. Foster's husband and sons were away mostly, working with the drays—tank-sinking, dam-making, etc.— and her daughter was in service with the old land-grant family who owned Log Paddock—several thousands of acres of good, clear, level creek and river frontage land—and did nothing with it, while the selectors broke their backs and hearts trying to make farms in the barren ridges. Mrs. Foster was just a gaunt, practical bushwoman, who, in long years of hardship, drought and struggle, had lost the faculty of bothering about things. She kept some cows and fowls and sold eggs and butter, and assisted at bush confinements gratis. She worked hard always—it was a habit she couldn't break herself of; besides, there was nothing to rest for. She took the good, old, quiet Australian Journal—they had got into the habit of subscribing for it years and years before—and when it came she read it by snatches, between mending and patching, or over a lonely cup of tea, as if it were a less important part of her work, or duty, yet a part. She gave tramps their allowance of tucker, too, as a matter of course, as though she regarded them as details of ordinary bush life, in the ordinary bush day's work. And so they were.

The woman who lived in the two-roomed hut was


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 quite a young woman—thirty-two or thirty-three—and quite good-looking. She had in her grey eyes something that was past being haggard, and past being haunted, and past being contemptuous; an expression—if you might call it an expression, or the ghost of an expression as if hope, love, terror, horror, remorse, hatred and ice-cold contempt for the world and all in it had all been there at one time, but years ago. I saw just such an expression once in the eyes of a girl-singer who was playing a harp and singing in a low pub in a sailors' bar in Genoa. The woman in the hut had a weak face, or a face that had been weak, with a curved-down mouth, but looking as if it had been chiselled down with hard cuts in hard stone. She had belonged to a family of publicans on the old Pipe-clay goldfield; had run away to Sydney with some one as a girl, and come back in two or three years with a sewing machine and a baby girl; had gone with the rush to Gulgong and other fields, keeping grimly to herself, and working as a dressmaker. The vicious cackle of women's tongues had died out with the years, other children had been allowed and encouraged to play with her little girl—now a sweet, gentle little thing of ten or twelve—and from being referred to viciously as "Mrs. Brent-as-she-calls-herself," she came to be called Mrs. Brent by courtesy, then by custom, and now respectfully. The quiet influence of quiet, respectable men, who knew the world, had a lot to do in bringing this change about—they always treated her very respectfully. Mrs. Foster was her friend. They had been neighbours on Gulgong, too, where, one day,


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 Mrs. Foster got a suspicion. Then she watched, and next day, after breakfast, and when Mrs. Brent's little girl had gone to school, she dropped on her unexpectedly with a length of dress material. Mrs. Brent hastily threw a sheet of newspaper over half a loaf of bread, a saucer of dripping, and a cup of milkless, sugarless tea on the table; but she was too late. She was making moleskin trousers for the stores at that time. Mrs. Foster was a woman of hard, practical kindness, and little or no tact, and she offended Mrs. Brent at once.

"What do you mean," she demanded, "to come here and talk to me like that? What is it to you whether I had any breakfast or not? I don't know you! It's a new thing for a strange woman to come into a woman's house and insult her. Who are you, and what do you want?"

"I'm Mrs. Foster, and I was there when you were born, but you don't remember that. All I know is that you're starving yourself—you can't work on an empty stomach; no woman can. You'll break down. And there's your little girl——"

"She had an egg for her breakfast," broke in Mrs. Brent passionately. "There's the shell in the fireplace if you don't believe me. If you think I'm a pauper to be—to be—But why! To think of the brazen impudence of it!" she gasped. "Now you just get out of this house, whoever you are! There's the door!"

And so it was, but so there was Mrs. Foster, who had managed men in the D.T.'s and had nursed a mad


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 who it was, wanted to see Jim particularly. And Andy got into the way of starting when a message or call came from "home," just as Jim would start at the gleam of a "mounted trooper's" cap.

And they blamed Andy for every misfortune. No matter what it was, the blame would be screwed, by the family mental twist, round on to Andy. It was Andy's blundering—who never blundered from the right thing; or it was Andy's "thick tongue"—who had a silent and "straight" one. If Andy hadn't done this; or if Andy hadn't done that. If Andy hadn't said this; or if Andy hadn't said that. If Andy hadn't told.

There is a gap in the catalogue of family troubles, for I was away from the district; but the first day of my return it was my misfortune to have to ride on to Mathews', which meant Andy, with the cheerful message that Bob had been thrown from his horse on the way home from his last shed; or rather, that both his horses and he had fallen into a gully, and one horse had broken his neck and the other her leg (and had to be shot), and Bob was lying more or less broken-up at the Halfway House, where his recovery would be doubtful.

I found Andy rigging a Spanish windlass over a shaft in Sapling Gully, above the farm, where one of the plough horses had fallen down in the night. Old Mathews had just run home for tools, a pole, or fencing-wire, or something.

Billy Leonard, Mrs. Mathews' brother, arrived with me, having been sent for, and he was wild. He thought


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 it was his horse he had lent Andy the week before, and had been stoking himself and boiling-over all the way, and, as is usual in such cases, he was not mollified to find that he had worked himself up for nothing.

"Look here, Andy Page!" he said, "send back my horse to-morrow. I can't breed horses to burst themselves for other people, and be let loose to fall down a shaft any night."

"But it isn't your horse, Mr. Leonard," said Andy.

"Don't you mind whose horse it is. You send it back to-night. You won't want it now, anyway, by the look of things."

"Well, Mr. Leonard," said Andy, plucking up, " I only borrowed it to help your own sister, anyway. You might think of that." "Well, if that's the way you're going to talk to me, Andy Page," snarled Billy, "you can get your horse out yourself. An' look here, before you begin to talk to me, you can let me have the rest of that fiver I lent you. Send back my horse to-night, that's all!" and he rode off.

It struck Andy's face stoney, for he knew why the "fiver" had been borrowed, and where it went. But there was no help for it. I had to tell him about Bob.

Then Andy gave his head a despairing jerk, and his arm a great, impatient swing—the first time I remember him showing a sign of impatience, and he said to me, as if struck with a sudden idea—

"Look here, Harry! That family's gettin' redicklus!"

Then, as though momentarily stunned by the


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 stupendous ingratitude of it all, he passed his hand across his sweaty, clayey brow, and added—

"An' it's lucky for me that I didn't marry inter it. I'll say that now."

But just here there was a great screaming and running about and wringing of helpless hands down at the house. Then Mary came running, screaming all the way up the gully. Andy seemed rooted to the spot, awaiting the worst in deadly calmness.

"Andy! Andy!!" she screamed, "father's just bin found unconscious in the middle of ther forty-acre paddock."

Andy turned slowly, as though turned by hypnotism, and, after a short helpless stare in the direction where, I knew, lay the little cemetery on the hillside, he swung back again and started running in the direction of the forty-acre paddock.

She had loved, and had always shielded and stuck up for her father.

I thought I might as well follow.

The world is a ridiculous family, but it's safe to follow the Andies—at a little distance.


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 nose with a spring, and all the rest of it. When he has an appointment you'll see him burst out of the front door and rush down the street, jerking his watch out every few yards, his coat tails flying and his top-hat lowered like a battering-ram. It's a wonder he doesn't telescope into that hat against something.

He is a good magazine writer, and a grand chap personally; and when I get him quiet for an hour he's just the same old chap I knew in Sydney. He has had a gruelling which he will never forget. Some day I'll tell you about his life in London—the tragedy of it scared me. Talk about heroes!

But where was I? Oh, about St. Paul's and those places. I went through St. Paul's because I found myself on the steps and couldn't think of anywhere else to go just then. I went through the Art Gallery and the Abbey because my literary friend rushed me round and through those places. I must go and see for myself later on.

St. Paul's is one of those places which are built too big, in a way, to look large. Looming out of London, it does not appear more imposing than a big corrugated iron shed looming out of the lonely scrubs Out Back in Australia, and certainly less impressive when you are properly impressed (or rather oppressed) by the extent and loneliness of the mighty Bush.

I haven't seen the ruins of ancient lands—probably they would impress me; but as far as I have seen of the works of modern man, I can't help thinking that when he sets to work to build a great, useless building with an eye to bigness only he succeeds in putting up a


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 I've seen buildings in Australia and elsewhere of less than half the size of St. Paul's, which look much more imposing—the Hotel Australia in Sydney, for instance, or the Yankee insurance offices next the G.P.O.; but then in one case we have unbroken height, and in the other fresh clean granite and freestone work. In the guide-book pictures St. Paul's stands out complete—as in the guide-book pictures of most buildings in the world. There is an atmosphere suggestive of wide spaces—of asphalt walks and gardens running out a mile or two in any direction. This is one of the apparently useless lies of civilization—but I suppose it's born of commercialism, like most other lies—a little branch line lie of commercialism. You don't see much of St. Paul's in London—it is so crowded by buildings nearly as grimy and dingy as itself. A coat of soot round the lower part of the building hides the fine or graceful lines which may be in the stone work, and throws the columns—which should stand out clean and defined—flat against the inner wall; also it reduces the height of the building. The upper half of the building is a dirty, rain-washed white, and the soot is washed in streaks down over the ledges. I remember a black cliff in a corner of the coast in New Zealand with a cave in it and a round tussock hill on the top; on the upper ledges of the cliff millions of sea-birds were in the habit of roosting. St. Paul's, from a distance, reminds me of that cliff.

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 a white batten gate. It seemed lighter now. There was a house, or, rather, a hut suggested, with whitewashed slab walls and a bark roof. He walked quietly round to the door of a detached kitchen, opened it softly, went in and struck a match. A candle stood, stuck in a blot of its own grease, on one end of the dresser. He lit the candle and looked round.

The walls of the kitchen were of split slabs, the roof box-bark, the floor clay, and there was a large clay-lined fireplace, the sides a dirty brown, and the back black. It had evidently never been whitewashed. There was a bed of about a week's ashes, and above it, suspended by a blackened hook and chain from a grimy cross-bar, hung a black bucket full of warm water. The man got a fork, explored the bucket, and found what he expected—a piece of raw corned-beef in water, which had gone off the boil before the meat had been heated through.

The kitchen was furnished with a pine table, a well-made flour bin, and a neat safe and side-board, or dresser evidently—the work of a carpenter. The top of the safe was dirty—covered with crumbs and grease and tea stains. On one corner lay a school exercise book, with a stone ink-bottle and a pen beside it. The book was open at a page written in the form of verse, in a woman's hand, and headed— "Misunderstood."

He took the edges of the book between his fingers and thumbs, and made to tear it, but, the cover being tough, and resisting the first savage tug, he altered his


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 mind, and put the book down. Then he turned to the table. There was a jumble of dirty crockery on one end, and on the other, set on a sheet of stained newspaper, the remains of a meal—a junk of badly-hacked bread, a basin of dripping (with the fat over the edges), and a tin of treacle. The treacle had run down the sides of the tin on to the paper. Knives, heavy with treacle, lay glued to the paper. There was a dish with some water, a rag, and a cup or two in it— evidently an attempt to wash-up.

The man took up a cup and pressed it hard between his palms, until it broke. Then he felt relieved. He gathered the fragments in one hand, took the candle, and stumbled out to where there was a dust-heap. Kicking a hole in the ashes, he dropped in the bits of broken crockery, and covered them. Then his anger blazed again. He walked quickly to the back door of the house, thrust the door open, and flung in, but a child's voice said from the dark—

"Is that you, father? Don't tread on me, father."

The room was nearly as bare as the kitchen. There was a table, covered with cheap American oilcloth, and, on the other side, a sofa on which a straw mattress, a cloudy blanket, and a pillow without a slip had been thrown in a heap. On the floor, between the sofa and the table, lay a boy child almost on a similar mattress, with a cover of coarse sacking, and a bundle of dirty clothes for a pillow. A pale, thin-faced, dark-eyed boy.

"What are you doing here, sonny?" asked the father.


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 "Mother's bad again with her head. She says to tell you to come in quiet, and sleep on the sofa tonight. I started to wash up and clean up the kitchen, father, but I got sick."

"Why, what is the matter with you, sonny?" His voice quickened, and he held the candle down to the child's face.

"Oh, nothing much, father. I felt sick, but I feel better now."

"What have you been eating?"

"Nothing that I know of; I think it was the hot weather, father."

The father spread the mattress, blew out the candle, and lay down in his clothes. After a while the boy began to toss restlessly.

"Oh, it's too hot, father," he said. "I'm smothering."

The father got up, lit the candle, took a corner of the newspaper-covered "scrim" lining that screened the cracks of the slab wall, and tore it away; then he propped open the door with a chair.

"Oh, that's better already, father," said the boy.

The hut was three rooms long and one deep, with a verandah in front and a skillion, harness and tool room, about half the length, behind. The father opened the door of the next room softly, and propped that open, too. There was another boy on the sofa, younger than the first, but healthy and sturdy-looking. He had nothing on him but a very dirty shirt, a patchwork quilt was slipping from under him, and most of