- end_line
- 12133
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 12072
- text
- Forewarned now of the rubbish in that chest, I can not summon the heart
to open it. Trash! Dross! Dirt!"
"Pierre! Pierre! what change is this? Didst thou not tell me, ere we
came hither, that thy chest not only contained some silver and gold, but
likewise far more precious things, readily convertible into silver and
gold? Ah, Pierre, thou didst swear we had naught to fear!"
"If I have ever willfully deceived thee, Isabel, may the high gods prove
Benedict Arnolds to me, and go over to the devils to reinforce them
against me! But to have ignorantly deceived myself and thee together,
Isabel; that is a very different thing. Oh, what a vile juggler and
cheat is man! Isabel, in that chest are things which in the hour of
composition, I thought the very heavens looked in from the windows in
astonishment at their beauty and power. Then, afterward, when days
cooled me down, and again I took them up and scanned them, some
underlying suspicions intruded; but when in the open air, I recalled the
fresh, unwritten images of the bunglingly written things; then I felt
buoyant and triumphant again; as if by that act of ideal recalling, I
had, forsooth, transferred the perfect ideal to the miserable written
attempt at embodying it. This mood remained. So that afterward how I
talked to thee about the wonderful things I had done; the gold and the
silver mine I had long before sprung for thee and for me, who never were
to come to want in body or mind. Yet all this time, there was the latent
suspicion of folly; but I would not admit it; I shut my soul's door in
its face. Yet now, the ten thousand universal revealings brand me on the
forehead with fool! and like protested notes at the Bankers, all those
written things of mine, are jaggingly cut through and through with the
protesting hammer of Truth!--Oh, I am sick, sick, sick!"
"Let the arms that never were filled but by thee, lure thee back again,
Pierre, to the peace of the twilight, even though it be of the dimmest!"
She blew out the light, and made Pierre sit down by her; and their hands
were placed in each other's.
"Say, are not thy torments now gone, my brother?"
"But replaced by--by--by--Oh God, Isabel, unhand me!" cried Pierre,
starting up. "Ye heavens, that have hidden yourselves in the black hood
of the night, I call to ye! If to follow Virtue to her uttermost vista,
where common souls never go; if by that I take hold on hell, and the
uttermost virtue, after all, prove but a betraying pander to the
monstrousest vice,--then close in and crush me, ye stony walls, and into
one gulf let all things tumble together!"
"My brother! this is some incomprehensible raving," pealed Isabel,
throwing both arms around him;--"my brother, my brother!"
"Hark thee to thy furthest inland soul"--thrilled Pierre in a steeled
and quivering voice. "Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy
brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me?--I am
Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common
humanity,--no more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own
combustibles. If they have put powder-casks in me--let them look to it!
let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and seem to half-see,
somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide of
the mark. The demigods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash!
Isabel, I will write such things--I will gospelize the world anew, and
show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!--I will write it, I will
write it!"
- title
- Chunk 3