The CDPD Public Domain Collection for CDTV 3/CDPDIII.bin/books/poe/berenice

Text File | 1992-07-31 | 19KB | 302 lines

                                      1835
                                    BERENICE
                               by Edgar Allan Poe
BERENICE

     Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,
     curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas. --Ebn Zaiat.

  MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.
Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as
various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately
blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it
that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --from the
covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a
consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either
the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies
which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
  My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention.
Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my
gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of
visionaries; and in many striking particulars --in the character of
the family mansion --in the frescos of the chief saloon --in the
tapestries of the dormitories --in the chiselling of some buttresses
in the armory --but more especially in the gallery of antique
paintings --in the fashion of the library chamber --and, lastly, in
the very peculiar nature of the library's contents, there is more than
sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.
  The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that
chamber, and with its volumes --of which latter I will say no more.
Here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say
that I had not lived before --that the soul has no previous existence.
You deny it? --let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek
not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms --of
spiritual and meaning eyes --of sounds, musical yet sad --a
remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow, vague,
variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the
impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my
reason shall exist.
  In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what
seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of
fairy-land --into a palace of imagination --into the wild dominions of
monastic thought and erudition --it is not singular that I gazed
around me with a startled and ardent eye --that I loitered away my
boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is
singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me
still in the mansion of my fathers --it is wonderful what stagnation
there fell upon the springs of my life --wonderful how total an
inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The
realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only,
while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, --not
the material of my every-day existence-but in very deed that existence
utterly and solely in itself.

  Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my
paternal halls. Yet differently we grew --I ill of health, and
buried in gloom --she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy;
hers the ramble on the hill-side --mine the studies of the cloister
--I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most
intense and painful meditation --she roaming carelessly through life
with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of
the raven-winged hours. Berenice! --I call upon her name --Berenice!
--and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous
recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image
before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and
joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies
of Arnheim! --Oh! Naiad among its fountains! --and then --then all
is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease
--a fatal disease --fell like the simoom upon her frame, and, even
while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept, over her,
pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner
the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her
person! Alas! the destroyer came and went, and the victim --where
was she, I knew her not --or knew her no longer as Berenice.
  Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal
and primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in
the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the
most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy
not unfrequently terminating in trance itself --trance very nearly
resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery
was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own
disease --for I have been told that I should call it by no other
appelation --my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed
finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form
--hourly and momently gaining vigor --and at length obtaining over
me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must
so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties
of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more
than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is
in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general
reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with
which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically)
busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most
ordinary objects of the universe.
  To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some
frivolous device on the margin, or in the topography of a book; to
become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint
shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the door; to lose
myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp,
or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume
of a flower; to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound,
by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever
to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by
means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered
in; --such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries
induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed,
altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything
like analysis or explanation.
  Yet let me not be misapprehended. --The undue, earnest, and morbid
attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous,
must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity
common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of
ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an
extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily
and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the
dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not
frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of
deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion
of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or
first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case
the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming,
through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal
importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few
pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a centre.
The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the
reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained
that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing
feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more
particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the
attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.
  My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to
irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in
their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic
qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the
treatise of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio "de Amplitudine
Beati Regni dei"; St. Austin's great work, the "City of God"; and
Tertullian "de Carne Christi," in which the paradoxical sentence
"Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus
resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est" occupied my undivided
time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.
  Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial
things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by
Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human
violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled
only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although, to a
careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the
alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral condition of
Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise of that
intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some
trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree the case. In the
lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain,
and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle
life, I did not fall to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the
wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had been so
suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the
idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred,
under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True
to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but
more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice
--in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal
identity.
  During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely
I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence,
feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions
always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning --among
the trellissed shadows of the forest at noonday --and in the silence
of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her
--not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a
dream --not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of
such a being-not as a thing to admire, but to analyze --not as an
object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although
desultory speculation. And now --now I shuddered in her presence,
and grew pale at her approach; yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and
desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long,
and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.
  And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon
an afternoon in the winter of the year, --one of those unseasonably
warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful
Halcyon*, --I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner
apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes I saw that Berenice
stood before me.

  *For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of
warmth, men have called this clement and temperate time the nurse of
the beautiful Halcyon --Simonides.

  Was it my own excited imagination --or the misty influence of the
atmosphere --or the uncertain twilight of the chamber --or the gray
draperies which fell around her figure --that caused in it so
vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke
no word, I --not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy
chill ran through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety
oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and sinking back
upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless and motionless,
with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was
excessive, and not one vestige of the former being, lurked in any
single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the
face.
  The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the
once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow
temples with innumerable ringlets now of a vivid yellow, and Jarring
discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning
melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless,
and seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy
stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted;
and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed
Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I
had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!

  The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that
my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered
chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be
driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a
speck on their surface --not a shade on their enamel --not an
indenture in their edges --but what that period of her smile had
sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now even more
unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth! --the teeth!
--they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and
palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale
lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first
terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I
struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In
the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for
the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other
matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single
contemplation. They --they alone were present to the mental eye, and
they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental
life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I
surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I
pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their
nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive
and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability
of moral expression. Of Mad'selle Salle it has been well said, "que
tous ses pas etaient des sentiments," and of Berenice I more seriously
believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees. Des idees! --ah
here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! --ah
therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their
possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back
to reason.
    And the evening closed in upon me thus-and then the darkness came,
and tarried, and went --and the day again dawned --and the mists of
a second night were now gathering around --and still I sat
motionless in that solitary room; and still I sat buried in
meditation, and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its
terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it
floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber.
At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of horror and dismay;
and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled
voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or of pain. I
arose from my seat and, throwing open one of the doors of the library,
saw standing out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears,
who told me that Berenice was --no more. She had been seized with
epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the
night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations
for the burial were completed.

  I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there
alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and
exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well
aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred.
But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive --at
least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with
horror --horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more
terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my
existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and
unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain;
while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill
and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears.
I had done a deed --what was it? I asked myself the question aloud,
and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, "what was it?"
  On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little
box. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently
before, for it was the property of the family physician; but how
came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it?
These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at
length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence
underscored therein. The words were the singular but simple ones of
the poet Ebn Zaiat, "Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae
visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas." Why then, as I
perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and
the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?
  There came a light tap at the library door, and pale as the tenant
of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with
terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very
low. What said he? --some broken sentences I heard. He told of a
wild cry disturbing the silence of the night --of the gathering
together of the household-of a search in the direction of the sound;
--and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a
violated grave --of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing,
still palpitating, still alive!
  He pointed to garments;-they were muddy and clotted with gore. I
spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand; --it was indented with
the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object
against the wall; --I looked at it for some minutes; --it was a spade.
With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay
upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped
from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it,
with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental
surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking
substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

                                   -THE END-