 Chapter 25 Part 2 of Pierre, or the Ambiguities, by Herman Melville, as the revoked recording is in the public domain. Lucy, Isabelle, and Pierre. Pierre, at his book, and Chiladas. So before handy despise, 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 have put him in the attitude of an eager contender for renown. So before handy felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or sentries equally unsought for and equally loathed their given. So before handy felt the parameter call, scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole infinite company of infinitesimal critics, is 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, foretaste it all that this world hath either of praise or dispraise, and thus foretasting both goblets, anticipatingly hurl them both in its teeth. All panagyric, all denunciation, all criticism of any sort, would come too late for Pierre. But man does never give himself up thus adorless and shutteless 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, that became so effective 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 state's 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, is about where 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 net-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 their shutters banged like lashed bulwarks and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ships blocked from aloft, stemming such tempest through the deserted streets pure-felted dark triumphant joy that while others he called in fear to their kennels he alone defied the storm admiral, whose most vindictive pelting stuffed hell stones, striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of her 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 taprooms. 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 war-housing 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 unwanted 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 for bearing 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 blanked 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 gentle and nameless torpor, some horrible foretaste of death itself seemed stealing upon him. Chapter 4. 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 more imposing spectacle of natural scenery. But though a baseless vision in itself this airy spectacle assumed very familiar features to Pierre. It was the fantasmagoria 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 manner. 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 and 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 feign 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. There 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 50 miles distant the height viewed from the piazza of a soft haze canopy 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 hillside pastures be it said were thickly sown with a small white amaranthine flower which being irreconcilably distaithful 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 in so much 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 juni 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 way the immortal amaranth it will not die but last year's flowers survived 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 could lay or be pleased to abate our rent now on a somewhat near approach their precipice did not belies purple promise from that menorio piazza that sweet imposing purple promise which seemed fully to vindicate the banyanish old title originally bestowed but showed the profuse aerial foliage of a hanging forest nevertheless coming still more nigh long and frequent rants among the massive leaves revealed horrible glimpses of dark gripping 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 eclivity slowly rising close up to the precipice's base so that the effervescent grasses rippled against it as the effervescent waves of some great swell or long rolling below ripple against the waterline of a steep gigantic worship on the sea and as among the rolling sea like sands of egypt disordered rows of broken sphinxes led to the geopian pyramid itself so this long eclivity was thickly strewn with enormous rocky masses grotesque in shape and with wonderful features on them which seem to express that slumbering intelligence visible in some recumbent beast whose intelligence seems struck down 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 that misanthropic hill-scaling goat nibbled his sweetest food for the rock so barren in themselves distilled a subtle moisture which fed with greenness all things that grew about their igneous march quitting those recumbent rocks you still ascended toward the hanging forest and piercing within its lower most 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 through his courageous thues 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 beatling brow slurped under the showers of water drops chill as the last do's 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 protrudives 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 mass and yards of overwhelmed fleets hurled high and dashed domain all splintering together on hovering ridges of the Atlantic Sea you saw the melancholy trophies which the north wind championing the unclenchable coral of the winter had rested from the force and dismembered them on their own chosen battleground in barbarous disdain mid-disspectacle of wide and wanton spore 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 purple-ness which from the piazza of that 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 may have went skirting the inferior sideways terraces of pastures where the multiple and most sterile in odorous immortalness of the small white flower furnished no element for the mild cow's meditative cudd but here and there you still might smell from a farther sweet aromatic-ness of clumps of catnip that dear farmhouse herb soon you would see the modest verger of the plant itself and whereas wherever you saw that site 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 unimmigrating herb most fitly named the catnip since like the unrunnigate cat though all that's human forsake the place that plant will long abide long bask and bloom on the abandoned heart 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 aberrant 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 pastures skirt but took your way down the long declivity fronting the mystic height in midfield again you paused among the recumbent sphinx like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep you paused fixed by a form defined a form of awfulness you saw and salatus 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 asa 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 in which minute have stormed him off had heaved his undaufable incubus upon him and a writingly left him there to bathe out his ineffectual howl to be here this wonder's 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 chance 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 pier first beheld that deathless son of terror at that time in its untouched natural state the statue presented nothing but the turbaned head a vigorous 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 and salatus there subterraneously stood fast frozen into the earth at the junction of the neck spades and pics soon he'd part of his asa from him till at last a circular well was open round him to the depth of some 13 feet at that point the weary young collegians gave over their enterprise in despair with all their toil they had not yet come to the girdle of ancelotus 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 leavened 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 were 60 feet the waters yet up gush in elemental rivalry with those etna flames of old asserted to be the malicious breath of the born down giant not unworthy to be compared with that leavened demigod 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 ancelotus wrought by the vigorous hand of nature's self it did go farther than compare it did far surpass that fine figure mowed by the inferior skill of men 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 ancelotus in their midst shamefully recumbent at its base such was the wild scenery which now to peer 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 a new battered at the precipice's unresounding wall foremost among the mall he saw a moss turban almost giant who despairing of any other motive wreaking his immitable hate turned his vast trunk into a battering ram and hurled his own arched out ribs again and yet again against the invulnerable steep ancelotus it is ancelotus peer cried out in his sleep that moment the phantom faced him and peer saw ancelotus no more but on the titan's arm his trunk his own duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with prophetic discomforture and woe with trembling frame he started from his chair and woke from that ideal horror to all his actual grief chapter five nor did peers random knowledge of the ancient fables fail still further to elucidate the vision which so strangely has supplied a tongue to muteness but that elucidation was most repulsively fateful and foreboding possibly because peer did not leap the final barrier of gloom possibly because peer did not willfully rest 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 oh titan self was the son of incestuous callus entera the son of incestuous heaven and earth and titan married his mother terra another and accumulatively incestuous match and thereof ancelotus was one issue so ancelotus was both the son and grandson of an incest and even less they have been born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness of peer another mixed uncertain heaven aspiring but still not holy earth emancipated mood which again by its terrestrial taint held down to its terrestrial mother generated there the present doubly incestuous ancelotus within him so that the present mood of peer that reckless sky assault and 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 escalate wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best proof he came from the other but what so crawls contented in the moat before that crystal fort shows it was born within that slime and therefore ever will abide recovered somewhat from the after spell of this while vision folded in his transpire 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 about 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 un- cheerful though how indeed his countenance at all looked he could not tell for dreading some insupportably dark revealments in his glass he had a late holy abstain from appealing to it and in his mind he rapidly conned over what indifferent disguising or light-hearted games some things he should say when proposing to his companions the little design he cherished and even so to grim and salados the world the gods had chained for a ball to drag at his or freighted feet even so that globe put forth a thousand flowers whose fragile smiles disguised his ponderous flowed in the book 20 by part two chapter 26 of pierre or the ambiguities by herman melville this liver box recording is in the public domain a walk a foreign portrait a sail and the end chapter one come is the bell come lucy we have not had a single walk together yet it is cold but clear and once out of the city we shall find it sunny come get ready now and away for a stroll down to the work and then for some of the steamers on the bay no doubt lucy you will find in the bay scenery some hints for that secret sketch you are so busily occupied with air real living sitters do come and which you so devotedly work at all alone and behind closed doors upon this lucy's original look of pale rippling pleasantness and surprise evoked by pierre's unformed scene proposition to give himself some relaxation changed into one of infinite mute but unrundable meaning while her swimming eyes gently at all bewildered fell to the floor it is finished then quite isabel not unmindful of this by scene and passionately stepping forward so as to intercept pierre's momentary wrapped glance at the agitated lucy that by a book it is finished thank heaven not so so pierre and displacing all disguisements a hectic unsummoned expression suddenly came to his face but if that by a book be finished i must get on some other element than earth i have sat on earth's saddle till i am weary i must now vault over to the other saddle a while oh seems to me there should be two ceaseless steeds for a bold man to ride the land in the sea and like circusmen we should never dismount but only be studied and rested by leaping from one to the other while still side by side they both race round the sun i've been on the land steeds so long oh i am dizzy that will never listen to me pierre said lucy slowly there is no need of this incessant straining see isabel and i have both offered to be thy immanuel sees not in mere copying but in the original writing i'm sure that would greatly assist the impossible i fight a duel in which all seconds are forbidden up here pierre cried lucy dropping the shawl in her hand engaging at him with unspeakable longings of some unfathomable emotion namelessly glancy at lucy isabel slid near to him seized his hand and spoke i would go blind for the pierre here take out these eyes and use them for glasses so saying she looked with a strange momentary hardiness and defiance at lucy a general half involuntary movement was now made as if they were about to depart he already go ye before said lucy meekly i will follow nay one on each arm said pierre come as they pass through the low arch to vestibule into the street a jeep burnt game some sailor passing exclaimed steer small my lad is a narrow straight thou art in what says he said lucy gently yes it is a narrow straight of a street indeed but pierre felt a sudden tremble transferred to him from isabel who whispered something in articulate in his ear gaining one of the thoroughfares they drew near to a conspicuous placard over a door announcing that above stairs was a gallery of paintings recently imported from europe and now on free exhibition preparatory to their sale by auction though this encounter had been entirely unforeseen by pierre yet yielding to the sudden impulse he had once proposed their visiting the pictures the girls assented and they ascended the stairs in the anti-rin a catalogue was put into his hand he paused to give one hurried comprehensive glance at it among long columns of such names as rubens rafael angelo da menacino da vinci all shamelessly prefaced with the words undoubted or testified pierre met the following brief line number 99 a stranger's head by an unknown hand it seemed plain that the whole must be a collection of those wretched imported dogs which with the incredible effrontery peculiar to some of the foreign picture dealers in america were christened by the loftiest names known to art but as the most mutilated torsos of the perfections of antiquity art not unworthy the students attention neither are the most bungling modern incompleteness is for both or torsos one of perished perfections in the past the other by anticipation of yet unfulfilled perfections in the future still as pierre walked along by the thickly hung walls and seemed to detect the infatuated vanity which must have prompted many of these utterly unknown artists in the attempted execution by feeble hand vigorous themes he could not repress the most melancholy foreboding concerning himself all the walls of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of pictures grandly outlined but miserably filled the smaller and humbler pictures representing little familiar things were by far the best executed but these though touching him not pleasingly in one restricted sense awoke no dormant majesties in his soul and therefore upon the whole were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory at last pierre and isabel came to that painting of which pierre was capriciously in search number 99 my god see see cried isabel under strong excitement only my mirror has ever shown me that look before see by some mere hocus pocus of chance or subtly designing navery a real italian gem of art had found its way into this most hybrid collection of imposters no one who has passed through the great galleries of europe unbewildered by their wonderful multitudinousness of surpassing excellence a redundancy which neutralizes all discrimination or individualizing capacity in most ordinary minds no calm penetrative person can have victoriously run that painted gauntlet of the gods without certain very special emotions called forth by someone or more individual paintings to which however both the catalogs and the criticisms of the greatest connoisseurs deny any all transcending merit at all answering to the effect of thus casually produced there is no time now to show fully how this is suffice it that in such instances it is not the abstract excellence always but often the accidental congeniality which occasions this wonderful emotion still the individual himself is apt to impute it to a different cause hence the headlong enthusiastic admiration of some one or two men for things not at all praised by or at most which are indifferent to the rest of the world a matter so often considered inexplicable but in this stranger's head by the unknown hand the abstract general excellence united with the all surprising accidental congeniality in producing an accumulated impression of power upon both pierre and isabel nor was the strangeness of this at all impaired by the apparent uninterestedness of lucy concerning that very picture indeed lucy who owing to the occasional jolting of the crowd had loosened her arm from pierce and so gradually had gone on along the picture hall in advance lucy had thus passed the strange painting without the least special pause and had now wandered round to the precisely opposite side of the hall where at this present time she was standing motionless before a very tolerable copy the only other good thing in the collection of that sweetest most touching but most awful of all feminine heads the sentry of guido the wonderfulness of which head consists chiefly perhaps in a striking suggested contrast half identical with and half analogous to that almost supernatural one sometimes visible in the maidens of tropical nations namely soft and light blue eyes with an extremely fair complexion there by funerally jetty hair but with blue eyes and fair complexion that sentries hair is golden physically therefore all is in strict natural keeping which nevertheless still the more intensifies the suggested fanciful anomaly of so sweetly and seraphically blonde a being being double hooded as it were by the black crepe of the two most horrible crimes of one of which she is the object and of the other the agent possible to civilized humanity incest and parasite now this sentry and the stranger were hung at a good elevation in one of the upper tiers and from the opposite walls exactly faced each other so that in secret they seemed pantomimically talking over and across the heads of the living spectators below with the aspect of the sentry everyone is familiar the stranger was a dark comely youthful man's head portentously looking out of a dark shaded ground and ambiguously smiling there was no discoverable drapery the dark head with its crisp curly jetty hair seemed just disentangling itself from out of curtains and clouds but to isabel in the eye and on the bra were certain shadowy traces of her own unmistakable likeness well to pier this face was in part as the resurrection of the one he had burnt at the end not that the separate features were the same but the pervading look of it the subtler interior keeping of the entirety was almost identical still for all this there was an unequivocal aspect of foreignness of europeanism about both the face itself and the general painting is it is it can it be whispered isabel intensely now isabel knew nothing of the painting which pier had destroyed but she solely referred to the living being who under the designation of her father had visited her at the cheerful house to which she had been removed during childhood from the large and a nameable one by the pleasant woman in the coach without doubt though indeed she might not have been at all conscious of it in her own mystic mind she must have somehow vaguely fancied that this being had always through life worn the same aspect to everybody else which he had to her for so very brief an interval of his possible existence solely knowing him or dreaming of him it may have been under that one aspect she could not conceive of him under any other whether or not these considerations touching isabel's ideas occurred to pier at this moment is very improbable at any rate he said nothing to her either to deceive or un-deceive either to enlighten door obscure for indeed he was too much riveted by his own far interior emotions to analyze now the co-temporary ones of isabel so that their here came to pass a not unremarkable thing for though both were intensely excited by one object yet their two minds and memories were thereby directed to entirely different contemplations while still each for the time however unreasonably might have vaguely supposed the other occupied by one and the same contemplation pier was thinking of the share portrait isabel of the living phase yet isabel's vermic exclamations having reference to the living face were now as it were mechanically responded to by pier in syllables having reference to the chair portrait nevertheless so subtle and spontaneous was it all that neither perhaps ever after were discovered this contradiction for events world them so rapidly and peremptorily after this that they had no time for those calm retrospective reveries indispensable perhaps to such a discovery is it is it can it be was the intense whisper visible no it cannot be it is not reply pier one of the wonderful coincidences nothing more oh by that word pier we but vainly seek to explain the inexplicable tell me it is it must be it is wonderful let us be gone and let us keep eternal silence appear quickly and seeking lucy they abruptly left the place as before pier seemingly unwilling to be accosted by anyone he knew or who knew his companions unconsciously accelerating their steps while forced for a space to tread the thoroughfares chapter two as they hurried on pier was silent but while thoughts were hurrying and shouting in his heart the most tremendous displacing and revolutionizing thoughts were upheaving in him with reference to isabel nor though at the time he was hardly conscious of such a thing were these thoughts wholly unwelcome to him how did he know that isabel was his sister setting aside on dorothea's nebulous legend to which in some shadowy points here and there isabel still more nebulous story seemed to fit on though but uncertainly enough and both of which thus blurredly conjoining narrations regarded in the inscrupulous light of real naked reason were anything but legitimately conclusive and setting aside his own dim reminiscences of his wandering father's deathbed for though in one point of view those reminiscences might have afforded some degree of presumption as to his father's having been the parent of an unacknowledged daughter yet were they entirely inconclusive as to that presumed daughter's identity and the grand point now with pierre was not the general question whether his father had had a daughter but whether assuming that he had had isabel rather than any other living being was that daughter and setting aside all his own manifold and enter unfolding mystic entrance and dental persuasions originally born as he now seemed to feel purely of an intense procreative enthusiasm an enthusiasm no longer so all potential with him as of your setting all these aside and coming to the plain palpable facts how did he know that is about was his sister nothing that he saw in her face could he remembers having seen in his father's the chair portrait that was the entire sum and substance of all possible rakeable downright presumptive evidence which peculiarly appeal to his own separate self yet here was another portrait of a complete stranger a european a portrait imported from across the seas and to be sold at public auction which was just as strong and evidence as the other then the original of this second portrait was as much the father visible as the original of the chair portrait but perhaps there was no original at all to this second portrait it might have been a pure fancy piece to which concede indeed the uncharacterizing style of the of the filling up seemed to furnish no small testimony with such bewildering meditations as these in him running up like clasping waves upon the strand of the most latent sequences of his soul and with both isabel and lucy bodily touching his sides as he walked the feelings of pierre were entirely untranslatable into any words that can be used of late to pierre much more vividly than ever before the whole story visible had seemed an enigma a mystery and imaginative delirium especially since he had got so deep into the conventional mysteries of his book for he who is most practically and deeply conversant with mysticisms and mysteries he who professionally deals in mysticisms and mysteries himself often that man more than anybody else is disposed to regard such things in others as very deceptively be juggling and likewise is that to be rather materialistic in all his own merely personal notions as in their practical lives with priests of the leusinian religions and more than any other man is often inclined at the bottom of his soul to be uncompromisingly skeptical on all novel visionary hypotheses of any kind it is only the no mystics or the half mystics who properly speaking are credulous so that in pierre was presented the apparent anomaly of a mind which by becoming really profound in itself grew skeptical of all tender profundities whereas the contrary is generally supposed by some strange arts isabel's wonderful story might have been some way or for some cause forged for her in her childhood and craftily impressed upon her youthful mind which so like a slight mark in a young tree had now enlargingly grown with her growth till it had become this immense staring marvel tested by anything real practical and reasonable what less probable for instance than that fancy crossing of the sea in her childhood when upon pierre's subsequent questioning of her she did not even know that the sea was salt chapter three in the midst of all these mental confusions they arrived at the wharf and selecting the most inviting of the various boats which lay about them in three or four adjacent ferry slips and one which was bound for half hour sail across the wide beauty of that glorious bay they soon found themselves afloat in in swift lighting motion they stood leaning on the rail of the guard as the sharp craft darted out from among the lofty pine forests of ships masts and the tangled underbrush and cane breaks of the dwarf sticks of sluts and scowls soon the spires of stone on the land blend with the mass of wood on the water the crotch of the twin rivers pressed the great wedge city almost out of sight they swept by two little islets distant from the shore they wholly curved away from the domes of free stone and marble and gained the great sublime dome of the bay's wide open waters small breeze had been felt in the pent city that day but the fair breeze of naked nature now blew in their faces the waves began to gather and roll and just as they gained a point where still beyond between high promontories of fortresses the wide bay visibly sluiced into the atlantic isabel convulsively grasped the armor pier and convulsively spoke i feel it i feel it it is it is what feel is thou what is it the motion the motion does not understand pier said lucy i with concern and wonder is pale staring aspect the waves it is the motion of the waves that isabel speaks of lucy or rolling direct from the sea now again pier lapsed into a still stranger silence and reverie it was impossible altogether to resist the force of this striking corroboration of by far the most surprising and improbable thing in the whole surprising and improbable story of isabel where did he remember her vague reminiscent of the teetering sea that did not slope exactly as the floors of the unknown abandoned old house among the french-like mountains well plunged in these mutually neutralizing thoughts of the strange picture in the last exclamations of isabel the boat arrived at its destination a little hamlet on the beach not very far from the great blue slew sway into the ocean which was now yet more distinctly visible than before don't let us stop here credit is about look let us go through there bill must go through there see see out there from the blue yonder yonder far away out out far far away and away and away out there where the two blues meet and are nothing bill must go what is about murmur lucy that would be to go to far england or france though what's fine but few friends in far france isabel friends in far france and what friends have i hear art thou my friend in thy secret heart dost thou wish me well and for thee pier what am i but a vile clog to the dragging thee back from all thy felicity yes i will go yonder yonder out there i will i will unhand me let me plunge for an instant lucy looked incoherently from one to the other but both she and pier now mechanically again seized isabel's frantic arms as they were again thrown over the outer rail of the boat they dragged her back they spoke to her they sued her but though lest be a man is best to look deeply distrustfully at lucy and deeply reproachfully up here they did not leave the boat as intended too glad were they all when it unloosed from its fastenings and turned about upon the backward trip stepping to shore pier once more hurried his companions through the unavoidable publicity of the thoroughfares but less rapidly proceeded soon as they gained the more secluded streets chapter four gaining the apostles and leaving his two companions to the privacy of their chambers pier sat silent an intent by the stove in the dining room for a time and then was on the point of entering his closet from the corridor when deli suddenly following him said to him that she had forgotten to mention it before but he would find two letters in his room which have been separately left at the door during the absence of the party he passed into the closet and slowly shooting the bolt which for want of something better happened to be an old blunted dagger walked with his cap yet unmoved slowly up to the table and beheld the letters they were lying with their sealed sides up one in either hand he lifted them and held them straight out sideways from him i see not the writing no not yet by my own eye that they are meant for me yet in these hands i feel that i now hold the final poignards that shall stab me and by stabbing me make me to a most swift stabber in the recoil which point first this he tore open the left hand letter sir you are a swindler upon the pretense of writing a popular novel for us you have been receiving cash advances from us while passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous rhapsody filled from the vile atheists lucian and voltair our great press of publication has hitherto prevented our slightest inspection of our readers proofs of your book send not another sheet to us our bill for printing thus far and also for our cash advances swindled out of us by you is now in the hands of our lawyer who is instructed to proceed with instant rigor signed steel flint in asbestos he folded the left hand letter and put it beneath his left heel and stood upon it so and then opened the right hand letter thou pierre glendini art a villainous and purged liar it is the sole object of this letter imprintedly to convey the point blank lie to thee that taken in at thy heart it may be then sparse with our blood throughout thy system we've let some interval pass inactive to confirm and solidify our hate separately and together we brandy in thy every lung cell a liar liar because that is the scornfulest and loathsomeest title for a man which in itself is the compend of all infamous things signed glendini Stanley Frederick tartan he folded the right hand letter and put it beneath his right heel then folding his two arms stood upon both the letters these are most small circumstances but happening just now to me become indecisive to all imensities for now am i hate shod on these i will skate to my acquittal no longer do i hold terms with art world's bread of life and world's breath of honor both are snapped from me but i defy all worlds bread and breath here i step out before the drawn up worlds in wider space and challenge one and all of them to battle oh glan oh fred most fraternally do i leap to your rib crushing hugs oh how i love you too that she can make me lively hate in a world which elsewise only merits stagnant scorn now then where is this swindlers this coiners book here on this bio counter over which the corner thought to pass it to the world here will i nail it fast for a detected cheat and thus nailed fast now do i spit upon it and so get the start of the wise world's worst abuse of it now i go out to meet my fate walking toward me in the street as with hat on and glenn and frederick's letter invisibly crumpled in his hand he as it were some namulously passed into the room of isabel she gave loose to a thin long shriek at his wondrous white and haggard plight and then without the power to stir toward him sat petrified in her chair as one embalmed and glazed with icy varnish he heated her not but passed straight on through both intervening rooms and without a knock on premeditatedly entered lucie's chamber he would have passed out of that also into the corridor without one word but something stayed in the marvel girl sat before her easel a small box of pointed charcoal and some pencils by her side her painters wand held out against the frame the charcoal pencil suspended into fingers while with the same hand holding a quest of bread she was lightly brushing the portrait paper to efface some ill considered stroke the floor was scattered with the breadcrumbs and charcoal dust he looked behind the easel and saw his own portrait in the skeleton at the first glimpse of him lucie started not nor stirred but as if her own wand had there enchanted her sat tranced dead embers of departed fires lie by thee thou pale girl with dead embers thou seekest to relune the flame of all extinguished love weighs not so that bread eat it in bitterness he turned and entered the corridor and then without stretched arms paused between the two outer doors of isabel and lucie for ye too my most undiluted prayer is now that from your here unseen unfrozen chairs he may never stir alive the fool of truth the fool of virtue the fool of fate now quits ye forever as he now bed down the long winding passage someone eagerly hailed him from a stair what what my boy where now in such a squally hurry hello i say but without hitting him at all pierre drove on milthorpe looked anxiously and alarmedly after him a moment and made a movement in pursuit but paused again there was ever a black vein in this glendoning and now that vein is swell as if it were just one peg above a tourniquet drawn over tight i scarce durst dog him now yet my heart misgives me that i should shall i go to his rooms and ask what black thing this is that have befallen him no not yet might be thought officious they say i'm given to that i'll wait something may turn up soon i'll enter the front street and saunter some and then we'll see chapter five pierre passed on to a remote quarter of the building and abruptly entered the room of one of the apostles whom he knew there was no one in it he hesitated an instant then walked up to a bookcase with a chest of drawers in the lower part here i saw him put them this snow here i will try this wrenching open the lock drawer a brace of pistols a powder flask a bullet bag in a round green box of percussion caps laid before him ha what wondrous tools prometheus used who knows but more wondrous these that in an instant can unmake the top most three score years and ten of all prometheus makings come here's two tubes that'll out roar the thousand pipes of holland is the music in them no well then here's powder for the shrill treble and wadding for the tenor and a lead bullet for the concluding bass and and and i for the top wadding i'll send them back their lie implanted scorching in their brains he tore off that part of glennon fredsletter which more particularly gave the lie and having it rammed at home upon the bullets he thrust a pistol into either breast of his coat and taking the rear word passages went down into the back street directing his rapid steps toward the grand central thoroughfare of the city it was a cold but clear quiet and slantingly sunny day it was between four and five of the afternoon that hour when the great glaring avenue was most longed with haughty rolling carriages and proud wrestling promenaders both men and women but these last were mostly confined to the one wide pavement to the west the other pavement was well not deserted saved by porters waiters and parcel carriers of the shops on the west pave up and down for three long miles to streams of glossy shawl or broadcloth life unceasingly brushed by each other as long resplendent grouping trains of rival peacocks brush mixing with neither of these beer stalk midway between from his wild and fatal aspect one way the people took the wall the other way they took the curb unentangled lee beer threaded all their host though in its most in most heart bent he was on a straightforward mathematical intent his eyes were all about him as he went especially glanced over to the deserted pavement opposite for that emptiness did not deceive him himself had often walked that side the better to scan the pouring throng upon the other just as he gained a large open triangular space built round with the stateliest public erections the very proscenium of the town he saw glen and fred advancing in the distance on the other side he continued on and soon he saw them crossing over to him obliquely so as to take him face to face he continued on when suddenly running ahead of fred who now chafingly stood still because fred would not make two in the direct personal assault upon one and shouting lyre villain glen leap toward pier from front and with such lightning like ferocity that the simultaneous blow of his cow hide smoke pier across the cheek and left a half livid and half bloody brand for that one moment the people fell back on all sides from them and left them momentarily recoil from each other in a ring of panics but clapping both hands to his two breasts pier on both sides shaking off the sudden white grasp of two rushing girls tore out both pistols and rushed headlong upon glen for that one blow take here two deaths to his speechless sweet to murder thee spatterings of his own kindred blood were upon the pavement his own hand had extinguished his house in slaughtering the only unoutlawed human being by the name of glendening and pier was seized by a hundred contending hands chapter six that sundown pier stood solitary in a low dungeon of the city prison the cumbersome stone ceiling almost rested on his brow so that the long tears of massive cell galleries above seem partly piled on him his immortal immovable bleached cheek was dry but the stone cheeks of the walls were trickling the pent twilight of the contracted yard coming through the barred arrow slit fell and dim bars upon the granite floor here then is the untimely timely and life's last chapter well stitched in the middle nor book nor author of the book hath any sequel though each hath its last lettering it is ambiguous still had i been heartless now disowned and spurningly portioned off the girl at saddle matters then had i been happy through a long life on earth and perchance through a long eternity in heaven now it is merely hell in both worlds well be it hell i will motor trumpet of the flames and with my breath of flame breathe back my defiance but give me first another body i long and long to die to be rid of this dishonored cheek hung by the neck till thou be dead not if i forestall you though oh now to live is death and now to die is life now to my soul were a sword my midwife hark the hangman who comes thy wife and cousin so they say hope they may be they may stay till twelve wheezingly answered the utter and key pushing the tottering girls into the cell unlocking the door upon them ye two pale ghosts were this the other world ye were not welcome away good angel and bad angel both what pierre is neuter now oh ye stony roofs and seven full stony skies not thou art the murderer but thy sister hath murdered thee my brother oh my brother at these wailed words from isabel lucy shrunk up like a scroll and noiselessly fell at the feet of pierre he touched her heart dead girl wife or sister saint or fiend seizing isabel in his grasp in thy breast life for infants lodgeth not but deathmilk for the amid the drug and tearing her bosom lucy sees the secret vial nesting there chapter seven at night the squad framed asthmatic turnkey tramp to dim-lit iron gallery before one of the long honeycombed rows of cells mighty still there in that hole them two mice i let in suddenly at the further end of the gallery he discerned a shattery figure emerging from the archway there and running on before an officer and impetuously approaching where the turnkeys did more relations coming these windbroken chaps are always in before the second death seeing they always miss the first hmm what a froth the fellow's in wheeze is worse than me where is she cried fred tartan fiercely to him she's not at the murderer's rooms i saw the sweet girl there instant upon the blow but the lone dumb thing i found there only rung her speechless hands and pointed to the door both birds were flown where is she turnkey i've searched all links and breaths but this if any angel swept it down and lighted in your granite hell broken his wind and broken loose to ain't he wheeze the turnkey to the officer who now came up this gentleman seeks a young lady his sister some way innocently connected with the prisoner last brought in have any females been here to see him oh i two of them in there now jerking his stump thumb behind him fred darted toward the designated cell oh easy easy young gentleman jingling at his huge bunch of keys easy easy till i get the pics i'm housewife here hollow here comes another herring through the same archway toward them they're now rapidly advanced the second impetuous figure running on in advance of a second officer where's the cell demanded mail thought he seeks an interview with the last prisoner explained the second officer kill him both with one stone then wheeze the turnkey gratingly throwing open the door of the cell theirs is pretty parlor gentlemen step in regular mousehole aren't it might hear a rabbit burrow on the world's tether side are they all asleep i stumble quite fred from within lucy a light a light lucy and he wildly groped about the cell and blindly caught milthorpe who was also wildly groping lister may not take off that bloody touch ho ho the light lucy lucy she's fainted then both stumbled again and felt from each other in the cell and for a moment all seemed still as though all breaths were held as the light was now thrust in fred was seen on the floor holding his sister in his arms and milthorpe kneeling by the side of pierre the unresponsive hand in his while isabel feebly moving reclined between against the wall yes yes dead dead dead without one visible wound her sweet plume each hides it thou hellish carrion this is thy hellish work thy juggler's rifle brought down this heavenly bird oh my god my god thou scalpest me with this sight the dark veins burst and here's the deluge wreck all stranded here up here my old companion pierr schoolmate playmate friend our sweet boys walks within the woods oh i would have rallied thee and banteringly warned thee from that two moody ways but thou would never heed what scornful innocence rests on thy lips my friend hands scorched with murderous powder yet how woman soft by heaven these fingers moved one speechless clasp all's oar all's oar and you know him not came gasping from the wall and from the fingers of isabel dropped an empty vial as it had been a runout sandglass and shivered upon the floor and her whole form sloped sideways and she fell upon pierre's heart and a long hair ran over him and arbored him in ebb and vines finy end of chapter 26 end of pierre or the ambiguities by herman melville