- end_line
- 15168
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 15110
- text
- lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ship's
blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempests through the deserted streets,
Pierre felt a dark, triumphant joy; that while others had crawled in
fear to their kennels, he alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most
vindictive peltings of hail-stones,--striking his iron-framed fiery
furnace of a body,--melted into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled
from off him.
By-and-by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps
down the dark, narrow side-streets, in quest of the more secluded and
mysterious tap-rooms. There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in
sitting down all dripping in a chair, ordering his half-pint of ale
before him, and drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light,
eye the varied faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts
from the bitterest midnights.
But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and now nothing
but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes would
content him, or be at all sufferable to him. Among these he had now been
accustomed to wind in and out every evening; till one night as he paused
a moment previous to turning about for home, a sudden, unwonted, and
all-pervading sensation seized him. He knew not where he was; he did not
have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He could not see; though
instinctively putting his hand to his eyes, he seemed to feel that the
lids were open. Then he was sensible of a combined blindness, and
vertigo, and staggering; before his eyes a million green meteors danced;
he felt his foot tottering upon the curb, he put out his hands, and knew
no more for the time. When he came to himself he found that he was lying
crosswise in the gutter, dabbled with mud and slime. He raised himself
to try if he could stand; but the fit was entirely gone. Immediately he
quickened his steps homeward, forbearing to rest or pause at all on the
way, lest that rush of blood to his head, consequent upon his sudden
cessation from walking, should again smite him down. This circumstance
warned him away from those desolate streets, lest the repetition of the
fit should leave him there to perish by night in unknown and unsuspected
loneliness. But if that terrible vertigo had been also intended for
another and deeper warning, he regarded such added warning not at all;
but again plied heart and brain as before.
But now at last since the very blood in his body had in vain rebelled
against his Titanic soul; now the only visible outward symbols of that
soul--his eyes--did also turn downright traitors to him, and with more
success than the rebellious blood. He had abused them so recklessly,
that now they absolutely refused to look on paper. He turned them on
paper, and they blinked and shut. The pupils of his eyes rolled away
from him in their own orbits. He put his hand up to them, and sat back
in his seat. Then, without saying one word, he continued there for his
usual term, suspended, motionless, blank.
But next morning--it was some few days after the arrival of Lucy--still
feeling that a certain downright infatuation, and no less, is both
unavoidable and indispensable in the composition of any great, deep
book, or even any wholly unsuccessful attempt at any great, deep book;
next morning he returned to the charge. But again the pupils of his eyes
rolled away from him in their orbits: and now a general and nameless
torpor--some horrible foretaste of death itself--seemed stealing upon
him.
- title
- Chunk 4