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- 13041
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- 12995
- text
- 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 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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