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Title: The Blithedale Romance
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: February, 2000 [Etext #2081]
[Most recently updated: May 6, 2002]
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The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Table of Contents
I. OLD MOODIE
II. BLITHEDALE
III. A KNOT OF DREAMERS
IV. THE SUPPER-TABLE
V. UNTIL BEDTIME
VI. COVERDALE'S SICK CHAMBER
VII. THE CONVALESCENT
VIII. A MODERN ARCADIA
IX. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA
X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN
XI. THE WOOD-PATH
XII. COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE
XIII. ZENOBIA'S LEGEND
XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT
XV. A CRISIS
XVI. LEAVE-TAKINGS
XVII. THE HOTEL
XVIII. THE BOARDING-HOUSE
XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM
XX. THEY VANISH
XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
XXII. FAUNTLEROY
XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL
XXIV. THE MASQUERADERS
XXV. THE THREE TOGETHER
XXVI. ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE
XXVII. MIDNIGHT
XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE
XXIX. MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION
The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
I. OLD MOODIE
The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my
bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the
Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me
in an obscure part of the street.
"Mr. Coverdale," said he softly, "can I speak with you a moment?"
As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to
mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted
with her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the
mesmeric line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a
new science, or the revival of an old humbug. Since those times her
sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice;
nor, in fact, has any one of them come before the public under such
skilfully contrived circumstances of stage effect as those which at
once mystified and illuminated the remarkable performances of the
lady in question. Nowadays, in the management of his "subject,"
"clairvoyant," or "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and
openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a
step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries
with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his
preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the
contrary, all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque
disposition, and artistically contrasted light and shade, were made
available, in order to set the apparent miracle in the strongest
attitude of opposition to ordinary facts. In the case of the Veiled
Lady, moreover, the interest of the spectator was further wrought up
by the enigma of her identity, and an absurd rumor (probably set
afloat by the exhibitor, and at one time very prevalent) that a
beautiful young lady, of family and fortune, was enshrouded within
the misty drapery of the veil. It was white, with somewhat of a
subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of a cloud; and, falling
over the wearer from head to foot, was supposed to insulate her from
the material world, from time and space, and to endow her with many
of the privileges of a disembodied spirit.
Her pretensions, however, whether miraculous or otherwise, have
little to do with the present narrative--except, indeed, that I had
propounded, for the Veiled Lady's prophetic solution, a query as to
the success of our Blithedale enterprise. The response, by the bye,
was of the true Sibylline stamp,--nonsensical in its first aspect,
yet on closer study unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of
which has certainly accorded with the event. I was turning over this
riddle in my mind, and trying to catch its slippery purport by the
tail, when the old man above mentioned interrupted me.
"Mr. Coverdale!--Mr. Coverdale!" said he, repeating my name twice, in
order to make up for the hesitating and ineffectual way in which he
uttered it. "I ask your pardon, sir, but I hear you are going to
Blithedale tomorrow."
I knew the pale, elderly face, with the red-tipt nose, and the patch
over one eye; and likewise saw something characteristic in the old
fellow's way of standing under the arch of a gate, only revealing
enough of himself to make me recognize him as an acquaintance. He
was a very shy personage, this Mr. Moodie; and the trait was the more
singular, as his mode of getting his bread necessarily brought him
into the stir and hubbub of the world more than the generality of men.
"Yes, Mr. Moodie," I answered, wondering what interest he could take
in the fact, "it is my intention to go to Blithedale to-morrow. Can
I be of any service to you before my departure?"
"If you pleased, Mr. Coverdale," said he, "you might do me a very
great favor."
"A very great one?" repeated I, in a tone that must have expressed
but little alacrity of beneficence, although I was ready to do the
old man any amount of kindness involving no special trouble to myself.
"A very great favor, do you say? My time is brief, Mr. Moodie, and
I have a good many preparations to make. But be good enough to tell
me what you wish."
"Ah, sir," replied Old Moodie, "I don't quite like to do that; and,
on further thoughts, Mr. Coverdale, perhaps I had better apply to
some older gentleman, or to some lady, if you would have the kindness
to make me known to one, who may happen to be going to Blithedale.
You are a young man, sir!"
"Does that fact lessen my availability for your purpose?" asked I.
"However, if an older man will suit you better, there is Mr.
Hollingsworth, who has three or four years the advantage of me in age,
and is a much more solid character, and a philanthropist to boot. I
am only a poet, and, so the critics tell me, no great affair at that!
But what can this business be, Mr. Moodie? It begins to interest me;
especially since your hint that a lady's influence might be found
desirable. Come, I am really anxious to be of service to you."
But the old fellow, in his civil and demure manner, was both freakish
and obstinate; and he had now taken some notion or other into his
head that made him hesitate in his former design.
"I wonder, sir," said he, "whether you know a lady whom they call
Zenobia?"
"Not personally," I answered, "although I expect that pleasure
to-morrow, as she has got the start of the rest of us, and is already
a resident at Blithedale. But have you a literary turn, Mr. Moodie?
or have you taken up the advocacy of women's rights? or what else can
have interested you in this lady? Zenobia, by the bye, as I suppose
you know, is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she
comes before the world, retaining all the privileges of privacy,--a
contrivance, in short, like the white drapery of the Veiled Lady,
only a little more transparent. But it is late. Will you tell me
what I can do for you?"
"Please to excuse me to-night, Mr. Coverdale," said Moodie. "You are
very kind; but I am afraid I have troubled you, when, after all,
there may be no need. Perhaps, with your good leave, I will come to
your lodgings to-morrow morning, before you set out for Blithedale.
I wish you a good-night, sir, and beg pardon for stopping you."
And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next
morning, it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at
a plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been.
Arriving at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate,
lighted a cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the
brightest to the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident
as at some former periods that this final step, which would mix me up
irrevocably with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could
possibly be taken. It was nothing short of midnight when I went to
bed, after drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I
used to pride myself in those days. It was the very last bottle; and
I finished it, with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out
for Blithedale.
II. BLITHEDALE
There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty
bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache),
there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth,
as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood
fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but
with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.
Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes
from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack
of more inspiring breath. Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the
dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for
my finger-ends! The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out.
Their genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest
phosphoric glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from
damp fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer
through a forest. Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us
might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards
the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning
the life of Paradise anew.
Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to
affirm--nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England,--
had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the
tropic. Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most
skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's
bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. But we
made a summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.
It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle
of the month. When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature
was mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself,
in one of the midmost houses of a brick block,--each house partaking
of the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its
individual furnace--heat. But towards noon there had come snow,
driven along the street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the
roofs and sidewalks with a business-like perseverance that would have
done credit to our severest January tempest. It set about its task
apparently as much in earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a
thaw for months to come. The greater, surely, was my heroism, when,
puffing out a final whiff of cigar-smoke, I quitted my cosey pair of
bachelor-rooms,--with a good fire burning in the grate, and a closet
right at hand, where there was still a bottle or two in the champagne
basket and a residuum of claret in a box,--quitted, I say, these
comfortable quarters, and plunged into the heart of the pitiless
snowstorm, in quest of a better life.
The better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough
if it looked so then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the
doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the
truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to
know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious,
to follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although,
if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be
consummated otherwise than by a failure. And what of that? Its
airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value
that lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable
scheme. They are not the rubbish of the mind. Whatever else I may
repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor
follies that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes
of the world's destiny--yes!--and to do what in me lay for their
accomplishment; even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside,
flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the
strike of city clocks, through a drifting snowstorm.
There were four of us who rode together through the storm; and
Hollingsworth, who had agreed to be of the number, was accidentally
delayed, and set forth at a later hour alone. As we threaded the
streets, I remember how the buildings on either side seemed to press
too closely upon us, insomuch that our mighty hearts found barely
room enough to throb between them. The snowfall, too, looked
inexpressibly dreary (I had almost called it dingy), coming down
through an atmosphere of city smoke, and alighting on the sidewalk
only to be moulded into the impress of somebody's patched boot or
overshoe. Thus the track of an old conventionalism was visible on
what was freshest from the sky. But when we left the pavements, and
our muffled hoof-tramps beat upon a desolate extent of country road,
and were effaced by the unfettered blast as soon as stamped, then
there was better air to breathe. Air that had not been breathed once
and again! air that had not been spoken into words of falsehood,
formality, and error, like all the air of the dusky city!
"How pleasant it is!" remarked I, while the snowflakes flew into my
mouth the moment it was opened. "How very mild and balmy is this
country air!"
"Ah, Coverdale, don't laugh at what little enthusiasm you have left!"
said one of my companions. "I maintain that this nitrous atmosphere
is really exhilarating; and, at any rate, we can never call ourselves
regenerated men till a February northeaster shall be as grateful to
us as the softest breeze of June!"
So we all of us took courage, riding fleetly and merrily along, by
stone fences that were half buried in the wave-like drifts; and
through patches of woodland, where the tree-trunks opposed a
snow-incrusted side towards the northeast; and within ken of deserted
villas, with no footprints in their avenues; and passed scattered
dwellings, whence puffed the smoke of country fires, strongly
impregnated with the pungent aroma of burning peat. Sometimes,
encountering a traveller, we shouted a friendly greeting; and he,
unmuffling his ears to the bluster and the snow-spray, and listening
eagerly, appeared to think our courtesy worth less than the trouble
which it cost him. The churl! He understood the shrill whistle of
the blast, but had no intelligence for our blithe tones of
brotherhood. This lack of faith in our cordial sympathy, on the
traveller's part, was one among the innumerable tokens how difficult
a task we had in hand for the reformation of the world. We rode on,
however, with still unflagging spirits, and made such good
companionship with the tempest that, at our journey's end, we
professed ourselves almost loath to bid the rude blusterer good-by.
But, to own the truth, I was little better than an icicle, and began
to be suspicious that I had caught a fearful cold.
And now we were seated by the brisk fireside of the old farmhouse,
the same fire that glimmers so faintly among my reminiscences at the
beginning of this chapter. There we sat, with the snow melting out
of our hair and beards, and our faces all ablaze, what with the past
inclemency and present warmth. It was, indeed, a right good fire
that we found awaiting us, built up of great, rough logs, and knotty
limbs, and splintered fragments of an oak-tree, such as farmers are
wont to keep for their own hearths, since these crooked and
unmanageable boughs could never be measured into merchantable cords
for the market. A family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their
kettle over precisely such a fire as this, only, no doubt, a bigger
one; and, contrasting it with my coal-grate, I felt so much the more
that we had transported ourselves a world-wide distance from the
system of society that shackled us at breakfast-time.
Good, comfortable Mrs. Foster (the wife of stout Silas Foster, who
was to manage the farm at a fair stipend, and be our tutor in the art
of husbandry) bade us a hearty welcome. At her back--a back of
generous breadth--appeared two young women, smiling most hospitably,
but looking rather awkward withal, as not well knowing what was to be
their position in our new arrangement of the world. We shook hands
affectionately all round, and congratulated ourselves that the
blessed state of brotherhood and sisterhood, at which we aimed, might
fairly be dated from this moment. Our greetings were hardly
concluded when the door opened, and Zenobia--whom I had never before
seen, important as was her place in our enterprise--Zenobia entered
the parlor.
This (as the reader, if at all acquainted with our literary biography,
need scarcely be told) was not her real name. She had assumed it,
in the first instance, as her magazine signature; and, as it accorded
well with something imperial which her friends attributed to this
lady's figure and deportment, they half-laughingly adopted it in
their familiar intercourse with her. She took the appellation in
good part, and even encouraged its constant use; which, in fact, was
thus far appropriate, that our Zenobia, however humble looked her new
philosophy, had as much native pride as any queen would have known
what to do with.
III. A KNOT OF DREAMERS
Zenobia bade us welcome, in a fine, frank, mellow voice, and gave
each of us her hand, which was very soft and warm. She had something
appropriate, I recollect, to say to every individual; and what she
said to myself was this:--"I have long wished to know you, Mr.
Coverdale, and to thank you for your beautiful poetry, some of which
I have learned by heart; or rather it has stolen into my memory,
without my exercising any choice or volition about the matter. Of
course--permit me to say you do not think of relinquishing an
occupation in which you have done yourself so much credit. I would
almost rather give you up as an associate, than that the world should
lose one of its true poets!"
"Ah, no; there will not be the slightest danger of that, especially
after this inestimable praise from Zenobia," said I, smiling, and
blushing, no doubt, with excess of pleasure. "I hope, on the
contrary, now to produce something that shall really deserve to be
called poetry,--true, strong, natural, and sweet, as is the life
which we are going to lead,--something that shall have the notes of
wild birds twittering through it, or a strain like the wind anthems
in the woods, as the case may be."
"Is it irksome to you to hear your own verses sung?" asked Zenobia,
with a gracious smile. "If so, I am very sorry, for you will
certainly hear me singing them sometimes, in the summer evenings."
"Of all things," answered I, "that is what will delight me most."
While this passed, and while she spoke to my companions, I was taking
note of Zenobia's aspect; and it impressed itself on me so distinctly,
that I can now summon her up, like a ghost, a little wanner than the
life but otherwise identical with it. She was dressed as simply as
possible, in an American print (I think the dry-goods people call it
so), but with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was
one glimpse of a white shoulder. It struck me as a great piece of
good fortune that there should be just that glimpse. Her hair, which
was dark, glossy, and of singular abundance, was put up rather
soberly and primly--without curls, or other ornament, except a single
flower. It was an exotic of rare beauty, and as fresh as if the
hothouse gardener had just clipt it from the stem. That flower has
struck deep root into my memory. I can both see it and smell it, at
this moment. So brilliant, so rare, so costly as it must have been,
and yet enduring only for a day, it was more indicative of the pride
and pomp which had a luxuriant growth in Zenobia's character than if
a great diamond had sparkled among her hair.
Her hand, though very soft, was larger than most women would like to
have, or than they could afford to have, though not a whit too large
in proportion with the spacious plan of Zenobia's entire development.
It did one good to see a fine intellect (as hers really was,
although its natural tendency lay in another direction than towards
literature) so fitly cased. She was, indeed, an admirable figure of
a woman, just on the hither verge of her richest maturity, with a
combination of features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful,
even if some fastidious persons might pronounce them a little
deficient in softness and delicacy. But we find enough of those
attributes everywhere. Preferable--by way of variety, at least--was
Zenobia's bloom, health, and vigor, which she possessed in such
overflow that a man might well have fallen in love with her for their
sake only. In her quiet moods, she seemed rather indolent; but when
really in earnest, particularly if there were a spice of bitter
feeling, she grew all alive to her finger-tips.
"I am the first comer," Zenobia went on to say, while her smile
beamed warmth upon us all; "so I take the part of hostess for to-day,
and welcome you as if to my own fireside. You shall be my guests,
too, at supper. Tomorrow, if you please, we will be brethren and
sisters, and begin our new life from daybreak."
"Have we our various parts assigned?" asked some one.
"Oh, we of the softer sex," responded Zenobia, with her mellow,
almost broad laugh,--most delectable to hear, but not in the least
like an ordinary woman's laugh,--"we women (there are four of us here
already) will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a
matter of course. To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew,--to
wash, and iron, and scrub, and sweep,--and, at our idler intervals,
to repose ourselves on knitting and sewing,--these, I suppose, must
be feminine occupations, for the present. By and by, perhaps, when
our individual adaptations begin to develop themselves, it may be
that some of us who wear the petticoat will go afield, and leave the
weaker brethren to take our places in the kitchen."
"What a pity," I remarked, "that the kitchen, and the housework
generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd
enough that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just
that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life--the life of
degenerated mortals--from the life of Paradise. Eve had no
dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day."
"I am afraid," said Zenobia, with mirth gleaming out of her eyes, "we
shall find some difficulty in adopting the paradisiacal system for at
least a month to come. Look at that snowdrift sweeping past the
window! Are there any figs ripe, do you think? Have the pineapples
been gathered to-day? Would you like a bread-fruit, or a cocoanut?
Shall I run out and pluck you some roses? No, no, Mr. Coverdale; the
only flower hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got out of a
greenhouse this morning. As for the garb of Eden," added she,
shivering playfully, "I shall not assume it till after May-day!"
Assuredly Zenobia could not have intended it,--the fault must have
been entirely in my imagination. But these last words, together with
something in her manner, irresistibly brought up a picture of that
fine, perfectly developed figure, in Eve's earliest garment. Her
free, careless, generous modes of expression often had this effect of
creating images which, though pure, are hardly felt to be quite
decorous when born of a thought that passes between man and woman. I
imputed it, at that time, to Zenobia's noble courage, conscious of no
harm, and scorning the petty restraints which take the life and color
out of other women's conversation. There was another peculiarity
about her. We seldom meet with women nowadays, and in this country,
who impress us as being women at all,--their sex fades away and goes
for nothing, in ordinary intercourse. Not so with Zenobia. One felt
an influence breathing out of her such as we might suppose to come
from Eve, when she was just made, and her Creator brought her to Adam,
saying, "Behold! here is a woman!" Not that I would convey the idea
of especial gentleness, grace, modesty, and shyness, but of a certain
warm and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have
been refined away out of the feminine system.
"And now," continued Zenobia, "I must go and help get supper. Do you
think you can be content, instead of figs, pineapples, and all the
other delicacies of Adam's supper-table, with tea and toast, and a
certain modest supply of ham and tongue, which, with the instinct of
a housewife, I brought hither in a basket? And there shall be bread
and milk, too, if the innocence of your taste demands it."
The whole sisterhood now went about their domestic avocations,
utterly declining our offers to assist, further than by bringing wood
for the kitchen fire from a huge pile in the back yard. After
heaping up more than a sufficient quantity, we returned to the
sitting-room, drew our chairs close to the hearth, and began to talk
over our prospects. Soon, with a tremendous stamping in the entry,
appeared Silas Foster, lank, stalwart, uncouth, and grizzly-bearded.
He came from foddering the cattle in the barn, and from the field,
where he had been ploughing, until the depth of the snow rendered it
impossible to draw a furrow. He greeted us in pretty much the same
tone as if he were speaking to his oxen, took a quid from his iron
tobacco-box, pulled off his wet cowhide boots, and sat down before
the fire in his stocking-feet. The steam arose from his soaked
garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectre-like.
"Well, folks," remarked Silas, "you'll be wishing yourselves back to
town again, if this weather holds."
And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell
silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes
intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow. The storm,
in its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary. It seemed to have
arisen for our especial behoof,--a symbol of the cold, desolate,
distrustful phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of
adventurous enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of
ordinary life.
But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be
depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if
it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. There
have been few brighter seasons for us than that. If ever men might
lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions
without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience,--yes,
and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an
object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained, we who
made that little semicircle round the blazing fire were those very
men. We had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we
had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep
most people on the weary treadmill of the established system, even
while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We
had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had
shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching,
enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the
enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose--a generous one,
certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its
generosity--to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the
sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than
the false and cruel principles on which human society has all along
been based.
And, first of all, we had divorced ourselves from pride, and were
striving to supply its place with familiar love. We meant to lessen
the laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share
of it at the cost of our own thews and sinews. We sought our profit
by mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an
enemy, or filching it craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves
(if, indeed, there were any such in New England), or winning it by
selfish competition with a neighbor; in one or another of which
fashions every son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of
the common evil, whether he chooses it or no. And, as the basis of
our institution, we purposed to offer up the earnest toil of our
bodies, as a prayer no less than an effort for the advancement of our
race.
Therefore, if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they
might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes, among the
fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if
all went to rack with the crumbling embers and have never since
arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my
own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world's
improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men
seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is
the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error.
Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation; but when he
did speak, it was very much to some practical purpose. For instance:--
"Which man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of swine? Some
of us must go to the next Brighton fair, and buy half a dozen pigs."
Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude
for this? And again, in reference to some discussion about raising
early vegetables for the market:--"We shall never make any hand at
market gardening," said Silas Foster, "unless the women folks will
undertake to do all the weeding. We haven't team enough for that and
the regular farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth
one common field-hand. No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up
a little too early in the morning, to compete with the market
gardeners round Boston."
It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised,
after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world,
should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the
outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the
truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large,
we stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood.
Nor could this fail to be the case, in some degree, until the
bigger and better half of society should range itself on our side.
Constituting so pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably
estranged from the rest of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the
strictness of our mutual bond among ourselves.
This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner
consciousness by the entrance of Zenobia. She came with the welcome
intelligence that supper was on the table. Looking at herself in the
glass, and perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown
rather languid (probably by being exposed to the fervency of the
kitchen fire), she flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a
village girl would throw away a faded violet. The action seemed
proper to her character, although, methought, it would still more
have befitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful woman to scatter
fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded ones by her touch.
Nevertheless, it was a singular but irresistible effect; the presence
of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a
masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up
men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us
to live in. I tried to analyze this impression, but not with much
success.
"It really vexes me," observed Zenobia, as we left the room, "that Mr.
Hollingsworth should be such a laggard. I should not have thought
him at all the sort of person to be turned back by a puff of contrary
wind, or a few snowflakes drifting into his face."
"Do you know Hollingsworth personally?" I inquired.
"No; only as an auditor--auditress, I mean--of some of his lectures,"
said she. "What a voice he has! and what a man he is! Yet not so
much an intellectual man, I should say, as a great heart; at least,
he moved me more deeply than I think myself capable of being moved,
except by the stroke of a true, strong heart against my own. It is a
sad pity that he should have devoted his glorious powers to such a
grimy, unbeautiful, and positively hopeless object as this
reformation of criminals, about which he makes himself and his
wretchedly small audiences so very miserable. To tell you a secret,
I never could tolerate a philanthropist before. Could you?"
"By no means," I answered; "neither can I now."
"They are, indeed, an odiously disagreeable set of mortals,"
continued Zenobia. "I should like Mr. Hollingsworth a great deal
better if the philanthropy had been left out. At all events, as a
mere matter of taste, I wish he would let the bad people alone, and
try to benefit those who are not already past his help. Do you
suppose he will be content to spend his life, or even a few months of
it, among tolerably virtuous and comfortable individuals like
ourselves?"
"Upon my word, I doubt it," said I. "If we wish to keep him with us,
we must systematically commit at least one crime apiece! Mere
peccadillos will not satisfy him."
Zenobia turned, sidelong, a strange kind of a glance upon me; but,
before I could make out what it meant, we had entered the kitchen,
where, in accordance with the rustic simplicity of our new life, the
supper-table was spread.
IV. THE SUPPER-TABLE
The pleasant firelight! I must still keep harping on it. The
kitchen hearth had an old-fashioned breadth, depth, and spaciousness,
far within which lay what seemed the butt of a good-sized oak-tree,
with the moisture bubbling merrily out at both ends. It was now half
an hour beyond dusk. The blaze from an armful of substantial sticks,
rendered more combustible by brushwood and pine, flickered powerfully
on the smoke-blackened walls, and so cheered our spirits that we
cared not what inclemency might rage and roar on the other side of
our illuminated windows. A yet sultrier warmth was bestowed by a
goodly quantity of peat, which was crumbling to white ashes among the
burning brands, and incensed the kitchen with its not ungrateful
fragrance. The exuberance of this household fire would alone have
sufficed to bespeak us no true farmers; for the New England yeoman,
if he have the misfortune to dwell within practicable distance of a
wood-market, is as niggardly of each stick as if it were a bar of
California gold.
But it was fortunate for us, on that wintry eve of our untried life,
to enjoy the warm and radiant luxury of a somewhat too abundant fire.
If it served no other purpose, it made the men look so full of youth,
warm blood, and hope, and the women--such of them, at least, as were
anywise convertible by its magic--so very beautiful, that I would
cheerfully have spent my last dollar to prolong the blaze. As for
Zenobia, there was a glow in her cheeks that made me think of Pandora,
fresh from Vulcan's workshop, and full of the celestial warmth by
dint of which he had tempered and moulded her.
"Take your places, my dear friends all," cried she; "seat yourselves
without ceremony, and you shall be made happy with such tea as not
many of the world's working-people, except yourselves, will find in
their cups to-night. After this one supper, you may drink buttermilk,
if you please. To-night we will quaff this nectar, which, I assure
you, could not be bought with gold."
We all sat down,--grizzly Silas Foster, his rotund helpmate, and the
two bouncing handmaidens, included,--and looked at one another in a
friendly but rather awkward way. It was the first practical trial of
our theories of equal brotherhood and sisterhood; and we people of
superior cultivation and refinement (for as such, I presume, we
unhesitatingly reckoned ourselves) felt as if something were already
accomplished towards the millennium of love. The truth is, however,
that the laboring
oar was with our unpolished companions; it being far easier to
condescend than to accept of condescension. Neither did I refrain
from questioning, in secret, whether some of us--and Zenobia among
the rest--would so quietly have taken our places among these good
people, save for the cherished consciousness that it was not by
necessity but choice. Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of
earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company, it was at our own
option to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again
to-morrow. This same salvo, as to the power of regaining our former
position, contributed much, I fear, to the equanimity with which we
subsequently bore many of the hardships and humiliations of a life of
toil. If ever I have deserved (which has not often been the case,
and, I think, never), but if ever I did deserve to be soundly cuffed
by a fellow mortal, for secretly putting weight upon some imaginary
social advantage, it must have been while I was striving to prove
myself ostentatiously his equal and no more. It was while I sat
beside him on his cobbler's bench, or clinked my hoe against his own
in the cornfield, or broke the same crust of bread, my earth-grimed
hand to his, at our noontide lunch. The poor, proud man should look
at both sides of sympathy like this.
The silence which followed upon our sitting down to table grew rather
oppressive; indeed, it was hardly broken by a word, during the first
round of Zenobia's fragrant tea.
"I hope," said I, at last, "that our blazing windows will be visible
a great way off. There is nothing so pleasant and encouraging to a
solitary traveller, on a stormy night, as a flood of firelight seen
amid the gloom. These ruddy window panes cannot fail to cheer the
hearts of all that look at them. Are they not warm with the
beacon-fire which we have kindled for humanity?"
"The blaze of that brushwood will only last a minute or two longer,"
observed Silas Foster; but whether he meant to insinuate that our
moral illumination would have as brief a term, I cannot say.
"Meantime," said Zenobia, "it may serve to guide some wayfarer to a
shelter."
And, just as she said this, there came a knock at the house door.
"There is one of the world's wayfarers," said I. "Ay, ay, just so!"
quoth Silas Foster. "Our firelight will draw stragglers, just as a
candle draws dorbugs on a summer night."
Whether to enjoy a dramatic suspense, or that we were selfishly
contrasting our own comfort with the chill and dreary situation of
the unknown person at the threshold, or that some of us city folk
felt a little startled at the knock which came so unseasonably,
through night and storm, to the door of the lonely farmhouse,--so it
happened that nobody, for an instant or two, arose to answer the
summons. Pretty soon there came another knock. The first had been
moderately loud; the second was smitten so forcibly that the knuckles
of the applicant must have left their mark in the door panel.
"He knocks as if he had a right to come in," said Zenobia, laughing.
"And what are we thinking of?--It must be Mr. Hollingsworth!"
Hereupon I went to the door, unbolted, and flung it wide open. There,
sure enough, stood Hollingsworth, his shaggy greatcoat all covered
with snow, so that he looked quite as much like a polar bear as a
modern philanthropist.
"Sluggish hospitality this!" said he, in those deep tones of his,
which seemed to come out of a chest as capacious as a barrel. "It
would have served you right if I had lain down and spent the night on
the doorstep, just for the sake of putting you to shame. But here is
a guest who will need a warmer and softer bed."
And, stepping back to the wagon in which he had journeyed hither,
Hollingsworth received into his arms and deposited on the doorstep a
figure enveloped in a cloak. It was evidently a woman; or, rather,--
judging from the ease with which he lifted her, and the little
space which she seemed to fill in his arms, a slim and unsubstantial
girl. As she showed some hesitation about entering the door,
Hollingsworth, with his usual directness and lack of ceremony, urged
her forward not merely within the entry, but into the warm and
strongly lighted kitchen.
"Who is this?" whispered I, remaining behind with him, while he was
taking off his greatcoat.
"Who? Really, I don't know," answered Hollingsworth, looking at me
with some surprise. "It is a young person who belongs here, however;
and no doubt she had been expected. Zenobia, or some of the women
folks, can tell you all about it."
"I think not," said I, glancing towards the new-comer and the other
occupants of the kitchen. "Nobody seems to welcome her. I should
hardly judge that she was an expected guest."
"Well, well," said Hollingsworth quietly, "We'll make it right."
The stranger, or whatever she were, remained standing precisely on
that spot of the kitchen floor to which Hollingsworth's kindly hand
had impelled her. The cloak falling partly off, she was seen to be a
very young woman dressed in a poor but decent gown, made high in the
neck, and without any regard to fashion or smartness. Her brown hair
fell down from beneath a hood, not in curls but with only a slight
wave; her face was of a wan, almost sickly hue, betokening habitual
seclusion from the sun and free atmosphere, like a flower-shrub that
had done its best to blossom in too scanty light. To complete the
pitiableness of her aspect, she shivered either with cold, or fear,
or nervous excitement, so that you might have beheld her shadow
vibrating on the fire-lighted wall. In short, there has seldom been
seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl's; and it was
hardly possible to help being angry with her, from mere despair of
doing anything for her comfort. The fantasy occurred to me that she
was some desolate kind of a creature, doomed to wander about in
snowstorms; and that, though the ruddiness of our window panes had
tempted her into a human dwelling, she would not remain long enough
to melt the icicles out of her hair. Another conjecture likewise
came into my mind. Recollecting Hollingsworth's sphere of
philanthropic action, I deemed it possible that he might have brought
one of his guilty patients, to be wrought upon and restored to
spiritual health by the pure influences which our mode of life would
create.
As yet the girl had not stirred. She stood near the door, fixing a
pair of large, brown, melancholy eyes upon Zenobia--only upon Zenobia!--
she evidently saw nothing else in the room save that bright, fair,
rosy, beautiful woman. It was the strangest look I ever witnessed;
long a mystery to me, and forever a memory. Once she seemed about to
move forward and greet her,--I know not with what warmth or with what
words,--but, finally, instead of doing so, she dropped down upon her
knees, clasped her hands, and gazed piteously into Zenobia's face.
Meeting no kindly reception, her head fell on her bosom.
I never thoroughly forgave Zenobia for her conduct on this occasion.
But women are always more cautious in their casual hospitalities than
men.
"What does the girl mean?" cried she in rather a sharp tone. "Is she
crazy? Has she no tongue?"
And here Hollingsworth stepped forward.
"No wonder if the poor child's tongue is frozen in her mouth," said
he; and I think he positively frowned at Zenobia. "The very heart
will be frozen in her bosom, unless you women can warm it, among you,
with the warmth that ought to be in your own!"
Hollingsworth's appearance was very striking at this moment. He was
then about thirty years old, but looked several years older, with his
great shaggy head, his heavy brow, his dark complexion, his abundant
beard, and the rude strength with which his features seemed to have
been hammered out of iron, rather than chiselled or moulded from any
finer or softer material. His figure was not tall, but massive and
brawny, and well befitting his original occupation; which as the
reader probably knows--was that of a blacksmith. As for external
polish, or mere courtesy of manner, he never possessed more than a
tolerably educated bear; although, in his gentler moods, there was a
tenderness in his voice, eyes, mouth, in his gesture, and in every
indescribable manifestation, which few men could resist and no woman.
But he now looked stern and reproachful; and it was with that
inauspicious meaning in his glance that Hollingsworth first met
Zenobia's eyes, and began his influence upon her life.
To my surprise, Zenobia--of whose haughty spirit I had been told so
many examples--absolutely changed color, and seemed mortified and
confused.
"You do not quite do me justice, Mr. Hollingsworth," said she almost
humbly. "I am willing to be kind to the poor girl. Is she a
protegee of yours? What can I do for her?"
"Have you anything to ask of this lady?" said Hollingsworth kindly to
the girl. "I remember you mentioned her name before we left town."
"Only that she will shelter me," replied the girl tremulously. "Only
that she will let me be always near her."
"Well, indeed," exclaimed Zenobia, recovering herself and laughing,
"this is an adventure, and well-worthy to be the first incident in
our life of love and free-heartedness! But I accept it, for the
present, without further question, only," added she, "it would be a
convenience if we knew your name."
"Priscilla," said the girl; and it appeared to me that she hesitated
whether to add anything more, and decided in the negative. "Pray do
not ask me my other name,--at least not yet,--if you will be so kind
to a forlorn creature."
Priscilla!--Priscilla! I repeated the name to myself three or four
times; and in that little space, this quaint and prim cognomen had so
amalgamated itself with my idea of the girl, that it seemed as if no
other name could have adhered to her for a moment. Heretofore the
poor thing had not shed any tears; but now that she found herself
received, and at least temporarily established, the big drops began
to ooze out from beneath her eyelids as if she were full of them.
Perhaps it showed the iron substance of my heart, that I could not
help smiling at this odd scene of unknown and unaccountable calamity,
into which our cheerful party had been entrapped without the liberty
of choosing whether to sympathize or no. Hollingsworth's behavior
was certainly a great deal more creditable than mine.
"Let us not pry further into her secrets," he said to Zenobia and the
rest of us, apart; and his dark, shaggy face looked really beautiful
with its expression of thoughtful benevolence. "Let us conclude that
Providence has sent her to us, as the first-fruits of the world,
which we have undertaken to make happier than we find it. Let us
warm her poor, shivering body with this good fire, and her poor,
shivering heart with our best kindness. Let us feed her, and make
her one of us. As we do by this friendless girl, so shall we prosper.
And, in good time, whatever is desirable for us to know will be
melted out of her, as inevitably as those tears which we see now."
"At least," remarked I, "you may tell us how and where you met with
her."
"An old man brought her to my lodgings," answered Hollingsworth, "and
begged me to convey her to Blithedale, where--so I understood
him--she had friends; and this is positively all I know about the
matter."
Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table,
pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its
exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself
to pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping
half of it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement
to cut slice after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities
with the butter-plate; and in all other respects behaving less like a
civilized Christian than the worst kind of an ogre. Being by this
time fully gorged, he crowned his amiable exploits with a draught
from the water pitcher, and then favored us with his opinion about
the business in hand. And, certainly, though they proceeded out of
an unwiped mouth, his expressions did him honor.
"Give the girl a hot cup of tea and a thick slice of this first-rate
bacon," said Silas, like a sensible man as he was. "That's what she
wants. Let her stay with us as long as she likes, and help in the
kitchen, and take the cow-breath at milking time; and, in a week or
two, she'll begin to look like a creature of this world."
So we sat down again to supper, and Priscilla along with us.
V. UNTIL BEDTIME
Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his
coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a
lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in
order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own
phrase, "something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may
imply) at the shoemaking business. We heard the tap of his hammer at
intervals for the rest of the evening. The remainder of the party
adjourned to the sitting-room. Good Mrs. Foster took her
knitting-work, and soon fell fast asleep, still keeping her needles
in brisk movement, and, to the best of my observation, absolutely
footing a stocking out of the texture of a dream. And a very
substantial stocking it seemed to be. One of the two handmaidens
hemmed a towel, and the other appeared to be making a ruffle, for her
Sunday's wear, out of a little bit of embroidered muslin which
Zenobia had probably given her.
It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our
poor Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia's protection.
She sat beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with
an expression of humble delight at her new friend's beauty. A
brilliant woman is often an object of the devoted admiration--it
might almost be termed worship, or idolatry--of some young girl, who
perhaps beholds the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as
little hope of personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of
heaven. We men are too gross to comprehend it. Even a woman, of
mature age, despises or laughs at such a passion. There occurred to
me no mode of accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by
supposing that she had read some of Zenobia's stories (as such
literature goes everywhere), or her tracts in defence of the sex, and
had come hither with the one purpose of being her slave. There is
nothing parallel to this, I believe,--nothing so foolishly
disinterested, and hardly anything so beautiful,--in the masculine
nature, at whatever epoch of life; or, if there be, a fine and rare
development of character might reasonably be looked for from the
youth who should prove himself capable of such self-forgetful
affection.
Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an
undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.
"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she
in the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It
is a
grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the
startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight
Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the
stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold
water and give me my death with a pair of wet slippers! And when the
verses are written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you
with my idea as to what the girl really is."
"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."
"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress
from the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose
than to do my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly
expect to make my dresses."
"How can you decide upon her so easily?" I inquired.
"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness
of masculine perceptions!" said Zenobia. "There is no proof which
you would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip
of her forefinger. Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her
paleness, her nervousness, and her wretched fragility. Poor thing!
She has been stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small,
close room, and has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins,
candy, and all such trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so,
as she has hardly any physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may
be allowed to think her spiritual."
"Look at her now!" whispered I.
Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her
wan face and great tears running down her cheeks. It was difficult
to resist the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our
voices, she must have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's
scornful estimate of her character and purposes.
"What ears the girl must have!" whispered Zenobia, with a look of
vexation, partly comic and partly real. "I will confess to you that
I cannot quite make her out. However, I am positively not an
ill-natured person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you,
and especially Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd
creature, and as she knocks with a very slight tap against my own
heart likewise,--why, I mean to let her in. From this moment I will
be reasonably kind to her. There is no pleasure in tormenting a
person of one's own sex, even if she do favor one with a little more
love than one can conveniently dispose of; and that, let me say, Mr.
Coverdale, is the most troublesome offence you can offer to a woman."
"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."
She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy
finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.
The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up
beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla
had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in
her place. This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was
evidently received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from
her, whatever the unuttered boon might be. From that instant, too,
she melted in quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element.
Though always an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme
of frequent discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth
fixed. We no more thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had
been recognized as a domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic
fireside of old, before we had ever been warmed by its blaze.
She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some
little wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and
proceeded to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape
of a silk purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just
such purses before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their
peculiar excellence, besides the great delicacy and beauty of the
manufacture, lay in the almost impossibility that any uninitiated
person should discover the aperture; although, to a practised touch,
they would open as wide as charity or prodigality might wish. I
wondered if it were not a symbol of Priscilla's own mystery.
Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired
her, our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the
strong puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made
the oaken frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us
apprehensively, as if to inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks
did not betoken some unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She
had been bred up, no doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously
sheltered court of the city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest,
though it might scatter down the slates of the roof into the bricked
area, could not shake the casement of her little room. The sense of
vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside against the black
panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful to the poor girl,
heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits, with the
lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street. The
house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night.
A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of
nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its
limitless extent. Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught
hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of one who hears her
own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably reluctant to obey
the call.
We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly
said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed.
Then, indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his
meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply
possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the
intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the
infrequent sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a
circumstance that seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence
that he awarded to them. His heart, I imagine, was never really
interested in our socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his
strange, and, as most people thought it, impracticable plan, for the
reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts.
Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate
him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of
the subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and
examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.
The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our
infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more
difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was
neither good nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of
the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the
aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local
appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and
interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of
very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested "Sunny
Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better system of society.
This we turned over and over for a while, acknowledging its
prettiness, but concluded it to be rather too fine and sentimental a
name (a fault inevitable by literary ladies in such attempts) for
sunburnt men to work under. I ventured to whisper "Utopia," which,
however, was unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly
maltreated, as if he had intended a latent satire. Some were for
calling our institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one
green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted
on a proviso for reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end,
when a final decision might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or
"Sahara." So, at last, finding it impracticable to hammer out
anything better, we resolved that the spot should still be Blithedale,
as being of good augury enough.
The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through
the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence,
close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were
the prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By and by the door was
opened by Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head,
and a tallow candle in his hand.
"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,
bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can. I shall sound
the horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine
cows to milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."
Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my
fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been
growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a
tremendous cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn,
a fit subject for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one.
During the greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a
fixed idea remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain,
while innumerable other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro,
combining constant transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made
a record of that night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it
would have anticipated several of the chief incidents of this
narrative, including a dim shadow of its catastrophe. Starting up in
bed at length, I saw that the storm was past, and the moon was
shining on the snowy landscape, which looked like a lifeless copy of
the world in marble.
From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the
moonlight, came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven
swiftly by the wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing
amid tufts of leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side,
until it swept across our doorstep.
How cold an Arcadia was this!
VI. COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER
The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us,
harsh, uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as
if this hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.
On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the
brethren of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves
into their habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin
the reformation of the world. Zenobia put her head into the entry,
and besought Silas Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough
to leave an armful of firewood and a pail of water at her chamber
door. Of the whole household,--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla,
for whose habits, in this particular, I cannot vouch,--of all our
apostolic society, whose mission was to bless mankind, Hollingsworth,
I apprehend, was the only one who began the enterprise with prayer.
My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned from his, the solemn
murmur of his voice made its way to my ears, compelling me to be an
auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator. It affected me with a
deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing,
or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor my
subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits
(except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly
marked out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the
divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.
As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward,
cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was,
the hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in
which I indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my
physical system; and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together
with the general chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into
my heart and the marrow of my bones. In this predicament, I
seriously wished--selfish as it may appear--that the reformation of
society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events,
to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely
out of the question.
What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better
society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough.
My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and
carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with
books and periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in
a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room
or picture gallery; my
noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive
succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which
I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at
command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott
when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen; my evening
at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's
party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this? Was it
better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a
barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows;
to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby
take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation
I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever and
die blaspheming, as I was like to do?
In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into
the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,
when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.
"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable
farmer! Don't you mean to get up to-day?"
"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I
ever rise again!"
"What is the matter now?" he asked.
I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town
in a close carriage.
"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."
Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to
do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse.
A doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much
medicine, in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have
laid on the point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I
speedily became a skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many
precious recollections connected with that fit of sickness.
Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one
of the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely
hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity
of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our
selfish existence. The education of Christianity, it is true, the
sympathy of a like
experience and the example of women, may soften and, possibly,
subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is originally
there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our brute
brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member of the herd from among
them, as an enemy. It is for this reason that the stricken deer goes
apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws himself into his den.
Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and
habitual affection, we really have no tenderness. But there was
something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of
Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is
best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft
place in his heart. I knew it well, however, at that time, although
afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten. Methought there could not
be two such men alive as Hollingsworth. There never was any blaze of
a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings and
shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those
eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.
Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!
and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably
there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone. How
many men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would
choose for his deathbed companions! At the crisis of my fever I
besought Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but
continually to make me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the
hand, a word, a prayer, if he thought good to utter it; and that then
he should be the witness how courageously I would encounter the worst.
It still impresses me as almost a matter of regret that I did not
die then, when I had tolerably made up my mind to it; for
Hollingsworth would have gone with me to the hither verge of life,
and have sent his friendly and hopeful accents far over on the other
side, while I should be treading the unknown path. Now, were I to
send for him, he would hardly come to my bedside, nor should I depart
the easier for his presence.
"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling.
"You know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal
more desperate than it is."
"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a
little of my customary levity.
"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you
fancy yourself so ready to leave it?"
"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty
verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs,
in our pastoral. It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as
viewed through a mist of fever. But, dear Hollingsworth, your own
vocation is evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and
nights in helping your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying
breaths."
"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me
fitted for this awful ministry?"
"By your tenderness," I said. "It seems to me the reflection of
God's own love."
"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully. "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."
"I do not believe it," I replied.
But, in due time, I remembered what he said.
Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so
serious as, in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to
consider it. After so much tragical preparation, it was positively
rather mortifying to find myself on the mending hand.
All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according
to the full measure of their capacity. Zenobia brought me my gruel
every day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth
must be told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit
by my bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several
gratuitous throbs to my pulse. Her poor little stories and tracts
never half did justice to her intellect. It was only the lack of a
fitter avenue that drove her to seek development in literature. She
was made (among a thousand other things that she might have been) for
a stump oratress. I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her
mind was full of weeds. It startled me sometimes, in my state of
moral as well as bodily faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood
of her philosophy. She made no scruple of oversetting all human
institutions, and scattering them as with a breeze from her fan. A
female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an instinctive
sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at that
spot. Especially the relation between the sexes is naturally among
the earliest to attract her notice.
Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her
dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of
her presence. The image of her form and face should have been
multiplied all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind
to retain her as the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have
been her proper sphere. She should have made it a point of duty,
moreover, to sit endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably
to the latter; because the cold decorum of the marble would consist
with the utmost scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely
be gladdened with her material perfection in its entireness. I know
not well how to express that the native glow of coloring in her
cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was
visible of her full bust,--in a word, her womanliness incarnated,--
compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite
the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion, no
doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.
I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always
a new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be
fervid and spicy. Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to
the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich
beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn;
so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem,
in a happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning
Zenobia's head. It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered
themselves about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more
gorgeous and wonderful than if beheld with temperate eyes. In the
height of my illness, as I well recollect, I went so far as to
pronounce it preternatural.
"Zenobia is an enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth. "She
is a sister of the Veiled Lady. That flower in her hair is a
talisman. If you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be
transformed into something else."
"What does he say?" asked Zenobia.
"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth.
"He is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being
a witch, and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in
your hair."
"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather
compassionately, and taking out the flower. "I scorn to owe anything
to magic. Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it
has any virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a
new one to-morrow. It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my
happier days!"
The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight
delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as I continued to know
this remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination,
though more slightly, yet in very much the same way. The reason must
have been that, whether intentionally on her part or not, this
favorite ornament was actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's
character.
One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed
myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever
been married. The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by
any circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears. So
young as I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a
thousand, there was certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny
already accomplished; the probability was far greater that her coming
years had all life's richest gifts to bring. If the great event of a
woman's existence had been consummated, the world knew nothing of it,
although the world seemed to know Zenobia well. It was a ridiculous
piece of romance, undoubtedly, to imagine that this beautiful
personage, wealthy as she was, and holding a position that might
fairly enough be called distinguished, could have given herself away
so privately, but that some whisper and suspicion, and by degrees a
full understanding of the fact, would eventually be blown abroad.
But then, as I failed not to consider, her original home was at a
distance of many hundred miles. Rumors might fill the social
atmosphere, or might once have filled it, there, which would travel
but slowly, against the wind, towards our Northeastern metropolis,
and perhaps melt into thin air before reaching it.
There was not--and I distinctly repeat it--the slightest foundation
in my knowledge for any surmise of the kind. But there is a species
of intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a
fact,--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.
The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when
a vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood.
Vapors then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image
falsehood, but sometimes truth. The spheres of our companions have,
at such periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when
robust health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy.
Zenobia's sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and
transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something
like a mesmerical clairvoyant.
Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost
perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was
not exactly maiden-like. What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did?
What girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and
inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman
to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes
I strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a
masculine grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is
often guilty towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet,
liberal, but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition.
Still, it was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.
Pertinaciously the thought, "Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived
and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this
perfectly developed rose!"--irresistibly that thought drove out all
other conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.
Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of
the point to which it led me.
"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while
she arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great
deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but
never, I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of
favoring me with. I seem to interest you very much; and yet--or else
a woman's instinct is for once deceived--I cannot reckon you as an
admirer. What are you seeking to discover in me?"
"The mystery of your life," answered I, surprised into the truth by
the unexpectedness of her attack. "And you will never tell me."
She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if
challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her
consciousness.
"I see nothing now," said I, closing my own eyes, "unless it be the
face of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well."
A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects
that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away. Otherwise,
the matter could have been no concern of mine. It was purely
speculative, for I should not, under any circumstances, have fallen
in love with Zenobia. The riddle made me so nervous, however, in my
sensitive condition of mind and body, that I most ungratefully began
to wish that she would let me alone. Then, too, her gruel was very
wretched stuff, with almost invariably the smell of pine smoke upon
it, like the evil taste that is said to mix itself up with a witch's
best concocted dainties. Why could not she have allowed one of the
other women to take the gruel in charge? Whatever else might be her
gifts, Nature certainly never intended Zenobia for a cook. Or, if so,
she should have meddled only with the richest and spiciest dishes,
and such as are to be tasted at banquets, between draughts of
intoxicating wine.
VII. THE CONVALESCENT
As soon as my incommodities allowed me to think of past occurrences,
I failed not to inquire what had become of the odd little guest whom
Hollingsworth had been the medium of introducing among us. It now
appeared that poor Priscilla had not so literally fallen out of the
clouds, as we were at first inclined to suppose. A letter, which
should have introduced her, had since been received from one of the
city missionaries, containing a certificate of character and an
allusion to circumstances which, in the writer's judgment, made it
especially desirable that she should find shelter in our Community.
There was a hint, not very intelligible, implying either that
Priscilla had recently escaped from some particular peril or
irksomeness of position, or else
that she was still liable to this danger or difficulty, whatever it
might be. We should ill have deserved the reputation of a benevolent
fraternity, had we hesitated to entertain a petitioner in such need,
and so strongly recommended to our kindness; not to mention, moreover,
that the strange maiden had set herself diligently to work, and was
doing good service with her needle. But a slight mist of uncertainty
still floated about Priscilla, and kept her, as yet, from taking a
very decided place among creatures of flesh and blood.
The mysterious attraction, which, from her first entrance on our
scene, she evinced for Zenobia, had lost nothing of its force. I
often heard her footsteps, soft and low, accompanying the light but
decided tread of the latter up the staircase, stealing along the
passage-way by her new friend's side, and pausing while Zenobia
entered my chamber. Occasionally Zenobia would be a little annoyed
by Priscilla's too close attendance. In an authoritative and not
very kindly tone, she would advise her to breathe the pleasant air in
a walk, or to go with her work into the barn, holding out half a
promise to come and sit on the hay with her, when at leisure.
Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty requital for her love.
Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with her. For several
minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves retained the
susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low, pleasant
murmur ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained it to
be Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to Hollingsworth.
She talked more largely and freely with him than with Zenobia,
towards whom, indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be
confidence as involuntary affection. I should have thought all the
better of my own qualities had Priscilla marked me out for the third
place in her regards. But, though she appeared to like me tolerably
well, I could never flatter myself with being distinguished by her as
Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.
One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my
chamber door. I immediately said, "Come in, Priscilla!" with an
acute sense of the applicant's identity. Nor was I deceived. It was
really Priscilla,--a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone
far enough into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of
girlhood), but much less wan than at my previous view of her, and far
better conditioned both as to health and spirits. As I first saw her,
she had reminded me of plants that one sometimes observes doing
their best to vegetate among the bricks of an enclosed court, where
there is scanty soil and never any sunshine. At present, though with
no approach to bloom, there were indications that the girl had human
blood in her veins.
Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of
snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed. She did not
seem bashful, nor anywise embarrassed. My weakly condition, I
suppose, supplied a medium in which she could approach me.
"Do not you need this?" asked she. "I have made it for you." It was
a nightcap!
"My dear Priscilla," said I, smiling, "I never had on a nightcap in
my life! But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that
I am a miserable invalid. How admirably you have done it! No, no; I
never can think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as
this, unless it be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company."
"It is for use, not beauty," answered Priscilla. "I could have
embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased."
While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I
perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting
for me to take. It had arrived from the village post-office that
morning. As I did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she
drew it back, and held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped
over it, in a way that had probably grown habitual to her. Now, on
turning my eyes from the nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me
that her air, though not her figure, and the expression of her face,
but not its features, had a resemblance to what I had often seen in a
friend of mine, one of the most gifted women of the age. I cannot
describe it. The points easiest to convey to the reader were a
certain curve of the shoulders and a partial closing of the eyes,
which seemed to look more penetratingly into my own eyes, through the
narrowed apertures, than if they had been open at full width. It was
a singular anomaly of likeness coexisting with perfect dissimilitude.
"Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?" said I.
She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite lost the look
that had drawn my notice.
"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"
"No," she answered.
"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her just now,--and it happens,
strangely enough, that this very letter is from her."
Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.
"I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!" she said
rather petulantly. "How could I possibly make myself resemble this
lady merely by holding her letter in my hand?"
"Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it," I replied;
"nor do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it. It was
just a coincidence, nothing more."
She hastened out of the room, and this was the last that I saw of
Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.
Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr.
Emerson's Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances
(lent me by Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the
brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little
else, most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary
sentinel, whose station was on the outposts of the advance guard of
human progression; or sometimes the voice came sadly from among the
shattered ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future.
They were well adapted (better, at least, than any other
intellectual products, the volatile essence of which had heretofore
tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present
bivouac was considerably further into the waste of chaos than any
mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before. Fourier's works,
also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a good deal
of my attention, from the analogy which I could not but recognize
between his system and our own. There was far less resemblance, it
is true, than the world chose to imagine, inasmuch as the two
theories differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their
main principles.
I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his
benefit, some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.
"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe
shall arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be
converted into a particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable
at Paris in Fourier's time. He calls it limonade a cedre. It is
positively a fact! Just imagine the city docks filled, every day,
with a flood tide of this delectable beverage!"
"Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it at once?" asked
Hollingsworth. "The jack-tars would be delighted to go down in ships
and do business in such an element."
I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly could, several
points of Fourier's system, illustrating them with here and there a
page
or two, and asking Hollingsworth's opinion as to the expediency of
introducing these beautiful peculiarities into our own practice.
"Let me hear no more of it!" cried he, in utter disgust. "I never
will forgive this fellow! He has committed the unpardonable sin; for
what more monstrous iniquity could the Devil himself contrive than to
choose the selfish principle,--the principle of all human wrong, the
very blackness of man's heart, the portion of ourselves which we
shudder at, and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to
eradicate,--to choose it as the master workman of his system? To
seize upon and foster whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial,
and abominable corruptions have cankered into our nature, to be the
efficient instruments of his infernal regeneration! And his
consummated Paradise, as he pictures it, would be worthy of the
agency which he counts upon for establishing it. The nauseous
villain!"
"Nevertheless," remarked I, "in consideration of the promised
delights of his system,--so very proper, as they certainly are, to be
appreciated by Fourier's countrymen,--I cannot but wonder that
universal France did not adopt his theory at a moment's warning. But
is there not something very characteristic of his nation in Fourier's
manner of putting forth his views? He makes no claim to inspiration.
He has not persuaded himself--as Swedenborg did, and as any other
than a Frenchman would, with a mission of like importance to
communicate--that he speaks with
authority from above. He promulgates his system, so far as I can
perceive, entirely on his own responsibility. He has searched out
and discovered the whole counsel of the Almighty in respect to
mankind, past, present, and for exactly seventy thousand years to
come, by the mere force and cunning of his individual intellect!"
"Take the book out of my sight," said Hollingsworth with great
virulence of expression, "or, I tell you fairly, I shall fling it in
the fire! And as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of
Gehenna, where, as I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at
this moment!"
"And bellowing, I suppose," said I,--not that I felt any ill-will
towards Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to
Hollingsworth's image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved
limonade a cedre!"
There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with
a man who allows himself to declaim in this manner; so I dropt the
subject, and never took it up again.
But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any
amount of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I
question whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to
receive it. I began to discern that he had come among us actuated by
no real sympathy with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because
we were estranging ourselves from the world, with which his lonely
and exclusive object in life had already put him at odds.
Hollingsworth must have been originally endowed with a great spirit
of benevolence, deep enough and warm enough to be the source of as
much disinterested good as Providence often allows a human being the
privilege of conferring upon his fellows. This native instinct yet
lived within him. I myself had profited by it, in my necessity. It
was seen, too, in his treatment of Priscilla. Such casual
circumstances as were here involved would quicken his divine power of
sympathy, and make him seem, while their influence lasted, the
tenderest man and the truest friend on earth. But by and by you
missed the tenderness of yesterday, and grew drearily conscious that
Hollingsworth had a closer friend than ever you could be; and this
friend was the cold, spectral monster which he had himself conjured
up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth of his heart, and of
which, at last,--as these men of a mighty purpose so invariably do,--
he had grown to be the bond-slave. It was his philanthropic theory.
This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it
had been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his
philanthropy. Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught
his benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel;
so that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of
love to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments,
unless they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which
he mistook for an angel of God. Had Hollingsworth's education been
more enlarged, he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this
pitfall. But this identical pursuit had educated him. He knew
absolutely nothing, except in a single direction, where he had
thought so energetically, and felt to such a depth, that no doubt the
entire reason and justice of the universe appeared to be concentrated
thitherward.
It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life,
Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people
(among whom I include humorists of every degree), it required all the
constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing
him an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one
string--such multiform presentation of one idea! His specific object
(of which he made the public more than sufficiently aware, through
the medium of lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the
construction of an edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment. On
this foundation he purposed to devote himself and a few disciples to
the reform and mental culture of our criminal brethren. His
visionary edifice was Hollingsworth's one castle in the air; it was
the material type in which his philanthropic dream strove to embody
itself; and he made the scheme more definite, and caught hold of it
the more strongly, and kept his clutch the more pertinaciously, by
rendering it visible to the bodily eye. I have seen him, a hundred
times, with a pencil and sheet of paper, sketching the facade, the
side-view, or the rear of the structure, or planning the internal
arrangements, as lovingly as another man might plan those of the
projected home where he meant to be happy with his wife and children.
I have known him to begin a model of the building with little stones,
gathered at the brookside, whither we had gone to cool ourselves in
the sultry noon of haying-time. Unlike all other ghosts, his spirit
haunted an edifice, which, instead of being time-worn, and full of
storied love, and joy, and sorrow, had never yet come into existence.
"Dear friend," said I once to Hollingsworth, before leaving my
sick-chamber," I heartily wish that I could make your schemes my
schemes, because it would be so great a happiness to find myself
treading the same path with you. But I am afraid there is not stuff
in me stern enough for a philanthropist,--or not in this peculiar
direction,--or, at all events, not solely in this. Can you bear with
me, if such should prove to be the case?"
"I will at least wait awhile," answered Hollingsworth, gazing at me
sternly and gloomily. "But how can you be my life-long friend,
except you strive with me towards the great object of my life?"
Heaven forgive me! A horrible suspicion crept into my heart, and
stung the very core of it as with the fangs of an adder. I wondered
whether it were possible that Hollingsworth could have watched by my
bedside, with all that devoted care, only for the ulterior purpose of
making me a proselyte to his views!
VIII. A MODERN ARCADIA
May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia�s sole decree, or by the
unanimous vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival.
It was deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to
clear away the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring
out a few of the readiest wild flowers. On the forenoon of the
substituted day, after admitting some of the balmy air into my
chamber, I decided that it was nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself
a prisoner any longer. So I descended to the sitting-room, and
finding nobody there, proceeded to the barn, whence I had already
heard Zenobia's voice, and along with it a girlish laugh which was
not so certainly recognizable. Arriving at the spot, it a little
surprised me to discover that these merry outbreaks came from
Priscilla.
The two had been a-maying together. They had found anemones in
abundance, houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few
long-stalked violets, and a quantity of white everlasting flowers,
and had filled up their basket with the delicate spray of shrubs and
trees. None were prettier than the maple twigs, the leaf of which
looks like a scarlet bud in May, and like a plate of vegetable gold
in October. Zenobia, who showed no conscience in such matters, had
also rifled a cherry-tree of one of its blossomed boughs, and, with
all this variety of sylvan ornament, had been decking out Priscilla.
Being done with a good deal of taste, it made her look more charming
than I should have thought possible, with my recollection of the wan,
frost-nipt girl, as heretofore described. Nevertheless, among those
fragrant blossoms, and conspicuously, too, had been stuck a weed of
evil odor and ugly aspect, which, as soon as I detected it, destroyed
the effect of all the rest. There was a gleam of latent
mischief--not to call it deviltry--in Zenobia's eye, which seemed to
indicate a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement.
As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore
nothing but her invariable flower of the tropics.
"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?" asked she,
surveying her as a child does its doll. "Is not she worth a verse or
two?"
"There is only one thing amiss," answered I. Zenobia laughed, and
flung the malignant weed away.
"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet
than myself. She is the very picture of the New England spring;
subdued in tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and
bringing us a few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer,
though hardly more beautiful, hereafter. The best type of her is one
of those anemones."
"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"
observed Zenobia, "is her wildness. Such a quiet little body as she
seemed, one would not have expected that. Why, as we strolled the
woods together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees,
like a squirrel. She has never before known what it is to live in
the free air, and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine.
And she thinks it such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly
Mr. Hollingsworth and myself, such angels! It is quite ridiculous,
and provokes one's malice almost, to see a creature so happy,
especially a feminine creature."
"They are always happier than male creatures," said I.
"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia
contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight. Did
you ever see a happy woman in your life? Of course, I do not mean a
girl, like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike,
while on the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman. How can
she be happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one
single event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her
whole life? A man has his choice of innumerable events."
"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one
event, may compensate for the lack of variety."
"Indeed!" said Zenobia.
While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a
distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder,
returning from the field. She immediately set out to meet him,
running and skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May
morning, but with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive;
she clapped her hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is
the custom of young girls when their electricity overcharges them.
But, all at once, midway to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round
about her, towards the river, the road, the woods, and back towards
us, appearing to listen, as if she heard some one calling her name,
and knew not precisely in what direction.
"Have you bewitched her?" I exclaimed.
"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl
do that identical thing once or twice before. Can you imagine what
is the matter with her?"
"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy
tongues that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."
From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have
deserted her. She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until
Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to
us, she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless
Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago. These
sudden transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme
nervous susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl,
though with diminished frequency as her health progressively grew
more robust.
I was now on my legs again. My fit of illness had been an avenue
between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through
which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and
knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that
lay beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death,
too, it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have
rid myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and
other such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along
the broad highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time,
however freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy
morning. The very substance upon my bones had not been fit to live
with in any better, truer, or more energetic mode than that to which
I was accustomed. So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any
other worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little
while in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more
satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and physical
truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the
exultation with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its
eternal progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in
an early grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as
now affected me for the flesh which I had lost.
Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of
the brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions.
Their enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which
they sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the
material
world and its climate. In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and
stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,
blossoming with many-colored delights. Thus Nature, whose laws I
had broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me
as a strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy
for his naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some
pretty playthings to console the urchin for her severity.
In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits
to our little army of saints and martyrs. They were mostly
individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust
them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had
suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come.
On comparing their minds one with another they often discovered
that this idea of a Community had been growing up, in silent and
unknown sympathy, for years. Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were
among them; sombre brows, but eyes that did not require spectacles,
unless prematurely dimmed by the student's lamplight, and hair that
seldom showed a thread of silver. Age, wedded to the past, incrusted
over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its
possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise
like this. Youth, too, in its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to
our purpose; for it would behold the morning radiance of its own
spirit beaming over the very same spots of withered grass and barren
sand whence most of us had seen it vanish. We had very young people
with us, it is true,--downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens,
and children of all heights above one's knee; but these had chiefly
been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and
methods of our institution to supply. Then we had boarders, from
town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized
more or less in our theories, and sometimes shared in our labors.
On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,
perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long.
Persons of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might
be called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot. But,
so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling,
with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near without
finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward.
We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on
every imaginable subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not
affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or
another to quarrel with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed
as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any
further. As to what should be substituted, there was much less
unanimity. We did not greatly care--at least, I never did--for the
written constitution under which our millennium had commenced. My
hope was, that, between theory and practice, a true and available
mode of life might be struck out; and that, even should we ultimately
fail, the months or years spent in the trial would not have been
wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience which
makes men wise.
Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers
fastened with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people
of poetry and the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we
looked rather like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a
company of honest laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers.
Whatever might be our points of difference, we all of us seemed to
have come to Blithedale with the one thrifty and laudable idea of
wearing out our old clothes. Such garments as had an airing,
whenever we strode afield! Coats with high collars and with no
collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with the waist at every
point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons of a dozen successive
epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the
wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a living epitome of
defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment of men who had
seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often retaining a
scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens
of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by
agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their
cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows,
and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn
comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted
in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have
served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the
matter was, that the first energetic movement essential to one
downright stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor
habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to
honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to
the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus,
"--which as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would
be apt to astonish the women-folks.
After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us.
Our faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and
our shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked
as if they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe,
the scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen
responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at
daybreak with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was
usually quite gone by breakfast-time.
To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They
told slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or
to drive them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from
their conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too,
that the cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and
invariably kicked over the pails; partly in consequence of our
putting the stool on the wrong side, and partly because, taking
offence at the whisking of their tails, we were in the habit of
holding these natural fly-flappers with one hand and milking with the
other. They further averred that we hoed up whole acres of Indian
corn and other crops, and drew the earth carefully about the weeds;
and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for
cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful planting few of our seeds
ever came up at all, or, if they did come up, it was stern-foremost;
and that we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a
field of beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this
unseemly way. They quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary
occurrence for one or other of us to crop off two or three fingers,
of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter. Finally, and as
an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues circulated a report
that we communitarians were exterminated, to the last man, by
severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own scythes! and
that the world had lost nothing by this little accident.
But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring
farmers. The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should
fail in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should
probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in
theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the
spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and
ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some
aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in
the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we
were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of
truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well
as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually
around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer
picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at
such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature,
as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no
opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which
she mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. The
clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and
over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the
contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing,
and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening.
Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily
exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of
finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and
integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or
welded into one substance.
Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as
Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.
"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the
hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."
"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.
"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."
"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?"
asked Zenobia. "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any
better than Burns did. Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an
individual you are to be, two or three years hence. Grim Silas
Foster is your prototype, with his palm of sole-leather, and his
joints of rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of
what he calls his winter's rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't
know what his brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but
yours may be cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety. Your
physical man will be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the
rate, I should imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about
the average which we find necessary in the kitchen. You will make
your toilet for the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by
rinsing your fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin
pan of water at the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden
pocket-comb before a seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass. Your only
pastime will be to smoke some very vile tobacco in the black stump of
a pipe."
"Pray, spare me!" cried I. "But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of
solacing himself with the weed."
"Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her
description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our
friend Foster never gets so far as the newspaper. When you happen to
sit down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal
proclamation of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be
jogged out of a nap, after supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and
persuaded to go regularly to bed. And on Sundays, when you put on a
blue coat with brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do
but to go and lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare
at the corn growing. And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen,
and will have a tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of
the hogs, and give a guess how much they will weigh after you shall
have stuck and dressed them. Already I have noticed you begin to
speak through your nose, and with a drawl. Pray, if you really did
make any poetry to-day, let us hear it in that kind of utterance!"
"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who
never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry. "Just think of
him penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this
good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out
of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him. If a
farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his
nature insists on it; and if that be the case, let him make it, in
Heaven's name!"
"And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for
she never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me. "You, I
think, cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."
"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth. "I have
hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart! It
matters little what my outward toil may be. Were I a slave, at the
bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in
its ultimate accomplishment, that I do now. Miles Coverdale is not
in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer."
"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt. "I
have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had
been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"
"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no
doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--"I cannot
conceive of being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the
sphere of a strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and
ennobled by its influence!"
This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had
already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other
illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to
make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.
Zenobia and Priscilla! These, I believe (unless my unworthy self
might be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his
mission; and I spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to
conjecture what Hollingsworth meant to do with them--and they with
him!
IX. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA
It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote
ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women.
If the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty
certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can
snatch a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend
under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true
relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts,
and of course patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder,
then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which,
after all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in
the real personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by
ourselves.
Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a
great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as
great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries
which I seemed to make. But I could not help it. Had I loved him
less, I might have used him better. He and Zenobia and
Priscilla--both for their own sakes and as connected with him--were
separated from the rest of the Community, to my imagination, and
stood forth as the indices of a problem which it was my business to
solve. Other associates had a portion of my time; other matters
amused me; passing occurrences carried me along with them, while they
lasted. But here was the vortex of my meditations, around which they
revolved, and whitherward they too continually tended. In the midst
of cheerful society, I had often a feeling of loneliness. For it was
impossible not to be sensible that, while these three characters
figured so largely on my private theatre, I--though probably reckoned
as a friend by all--was at best but a secondary or tertiary personage
with either of them.
I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed. But it
impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful
peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than
pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too
intimate a connection with him. He was not altogether human. There
was something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and
sympathies and affections and celestial spirit.
This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to
an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without,
nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with
all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little
else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament,
it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have
no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no
friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will
smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the
more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take
the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly
strait path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves
high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is
most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the
Devil been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features,
immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and
love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon
the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original
object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the
slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the
process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into
all-devouring egotism.
Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is
exaggerated, in the attempt to make it adequate. Professed
philanthropists have gone far; but no originally good man, I presume,
ever went quite so far as this. Let the reader abate whatever he
deems fit. The paragraph may remain, however, both for its truth and
its exaggeration, as strongly expressive of the tendencies which were
really operative in Hollingsworth, and as exemplifying the kind of
error into which my mode of observation was calculated to lead me.
The issue was, that in solitude I often shuddered at my friend. In
my recollection of his dark and impressive countenance, the features
grew more sternly prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth
and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely
flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted it with an
adamantine wrinkle. On meeting him again, I was often filled with
remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow
of a household fire that was burning in a cave. "He is a man after
all," thought I; "his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!--
not that steel engine of the Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!"
But in my wood-walks, and in my silent chamber, the dark face
frowned at me again.
When a young girl comes within the sphere of such a man, she is as
perilously situated as the maiden whom, in the old classical myths,
the people used to expose to a dragon. If I had any duty whatever,
in reference to Hollingsworth, it was to endeavor to save Priscilla
from that kind of personal worship which her sex is generally prone
to lavish upon saints and heroes. It often requires but one smile
out of the hero's eyes into the girl's or woman's heart, to transform
this devotion, from a sentiment of the highest approval and
confidence, into passionate love. Now, Hollingsworth smiled much
upon Priscilla,--more than upon any other person. If she thought him
beautiful, it was no wonder. I often thought him so, with the
expression of tender human care and gentlest sympathy which she alone
seemed to have power to call out upon his features. Zenobia, I
suspect, would have given her eyes, bright as they were, for such a
look; it was the least that our poor Priscilla could do, to give her
heart for a great many of them. There was the more danger of this,
inasmuch as the footing on which we all associated at Blithedale was
widely different from that of conventional society. While inclining
us to the soft affections of the golden age, it seemed to authorize
any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other,
regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent.
Accordingly the tender passion was very rife among us, in various
degrees of mildness or virulence, but mostly passing away with the
state of things that had given it origin. This was all well enough;
but, for a girl like Priscilla and a woman like Zenobia to jostle one
another in their love of a man like Hollingsworth, was likely to be
no child's play.
Had I been as cold-hearted as I sometimes thought myself, nothing
would have interested me more than to witness the play of passions
that must thus have been evolved. But, in honest truth, I would
really have gone far to save Priscilla, at least, from the
catastrophe in which such a drama would be apt to terminate.
Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still kept
budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which
you no sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all that
she had previously possessed. So unformed, vague, and without
substance, as she had come to us, it seemed as if we could see Nature
shaping out a woman before our very eyes, and yet had only a more
reverential sense of the mystery of a woman's soul and frame.
Yesterday, her cheek was pale, to-day, it had a bloom. Priscilla's
smile, like a baby's first one, was a wondrous novelty. Her
imperfections and shortcomings affected me with a kind of playful
pathos, which was as absolutely bewitching a sensation as ever I
experienced. After she had been a month or two at Blithedale, her
animal spirits waxed high, and kept her pretty constantly in a state
of bubble and ferment, impelling her to far more bodily activity than
she had yet strength to endure. She was very fond of playing with
the other girls out of doors. There is hardly another sight in the
world so pretty as that of a company of young girls, almost women
grown, at play, and so giving themselves up to their airy impulse
that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.
Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, more
untamable and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting
variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a
harmonious propriety through all. Their steps, their voices, appear
free as the wind, but keep consonance with a strain of music
inaudible to us. Young men and boys, on the other hand, play,
according to recognized law, old, traditionary games, permitting no
caprioles of fancy, but with scope enough for the outbreak of savage
instincts. For, young or old, in play or in earnest, man is prone to
be a brute.
Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race,
with her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they
need, and an air between that of a bird and a young colt. But
Priscilla's peculiar charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and
irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without exercise, except
to her poor little fingers, she had never yet acquired the perfect
use of her legs. Setting buoyantly forth, therefore, as if no rival
less swift than Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly,
and often tumbled on the grass. Such an incident--though it seems
too slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at, but which brought
the water into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far
greater joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as antiquated trash.
Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was full of trifles that affected
me in just this way.
When she had come to be quite at home among us, I used to fancy that
Priscilla played more pranks, and perpetrated more mischief, than any
other girl in the Community. For example, I once heard Silas Foster,
in a very gruff voice, threatening to rivet three horseshoes round
Priscilla's neck and chain her to a post, because she, with some
other young people, had clambered upon a load of hay, and caused it
to slide off the cart. How she made her peace I never knew; but very
soon afterwards I saw old Silas, with his brawny hands round
Priscilla's waist, swinging her to and fro, and finally depositing
her on one of the oxen, to take her first lessons in riding. She met
with terrible mishaps in her efforts to milk a cow; she let the
poultry into the garden; she generally spoilt whatever part of the
dinner she took in charge; she broke crockery; she dropt our biggest
water pitcher into the well; and--except with her needle, and those
little wooden instruments for purse-making--was as unserviceable a
member of society as any young lady in the land. There was no other
sort of efficiency about her. Yet everybody was kind to Priscilla;
everybody loved her and laughed at her to her face, and did not laugh
behind her back; everybody would have given her half of his last
crust, or the bigger share of his plum-cake. These were pretty
certain indications that we were all conscious of a pleasant weakness
in the girl, and considered her not quite able to look after her own
interests or fight her battle with the world. And
Hollingsworth--perhaps because he had been the means of introducing
Priscilla to her new abode--appeared to recognize her as his own
especial charge.
Her simple, careless, childish flow of spirits often made me sad.
She seemed to me like a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of
sunshine, and mistaking it for a broad and eternal summer. We
sometimes hold mirth to a stricter accountability than sorrow; it
must show good cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily.
Priscilla's gayety, moreover, was of a nature that showed me how
delicate an instrument she was, and what fragile harp-strings were
her nerves. As they made sweet music at the airiest touch, it would
require but a stronger one to burst them all asunder. Absurd as it
might be, I tried to reason with her, and persuade her not to be so
joyous, thinking that, if she would draw less lavishly upon her fund
of happiness, it would last the longer. I remember doing so, one
summer evening, when we tired laborers sat looking on, like
Goldsmith's old folks under the village thorn-tree, while the young
people were at their sports.
"What is the use or sense of being so very gay?" I said to Priscilla,
while she was taking breath, after a great frolic. "I love to see a
sufficient cause for everything, and I can see none for this. Pray
tell me, now, what kind of a world you imagine this to be, which you
are so merry in."
"I never think about it at all," answered Priscilla, laughing. "But
this I am sure of, that it is a world where everybody is kind to me,
and where I love everybody. My heart keeps dancing within me, and
all the foolish things which you see me do are only the motions of my
heart. How can I be dismal, if my heart will not let me?"
"Have you nothing dismal to remember?" I suggested. "If not, then,
indeed, you are very fortunate!"
"Ah!" said Priscilla slowly.
And then came that unintelligible gesture, when she seemed to be
listening to a distant voice.
"For my part," I continued, beneficently seeking to overshadow her
with my own sombre humor, "my past life has been a tiresome one
enough; yet I would rather look backward ten times than forward once.
For, little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for
one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People
never do get just the good they seek. If it come at all, it is
something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly
want. Then, again, we may rest certain that our friends of to-day
will not be our friends of a few years hence; but, if we keep one of
them, it will be at the expense of the others; and most probably we
shall keep none. To be sure, there are more to be had; but who cares
about making a new set of friends, even should they be better than
those around us?"
"Not I!" said Priscilla. "I will live and die with these!"
"Well; but let the future go," resumed I. "As for the present moment,
if we could look into the hearts where we wish to be most valued,
what should you expect to see? One's own likeness, in the innermost,
holiest niche? Ah! I don't know! It may not be there at all. It
may be a dusty image, thrust aside into a corner, and by and by to be
flung out of doors, where any foot may trample upon it. If not
to-day, then to-morrow! And so, Priscilla, I do not see much wisdom
in being so very merry in this kind of a world."
It had taken me nearly seven years of worldly life to hive up the
bitter honey which I here offered to Priscilla. And she rejected it!
"I don't believe one word of what you say!" she replied, laughing
anew. "You made me sad, for a minute, by talking about the past; but
the past never comes back again. Do we dream the same dream twice?
There is nothing else that I am afraid of."
So away she ran, and fell down on the green grass, as it was often
her luck to do, but got up again, without any harm.
"Priscilla, Priscilla!" cried Hollingsworth, who was sitting on the
doorstep; "you had better not run any more to-night. You will weary
yourself too much. And do not sit down out of doors, for there is a
heavy dew beginning to fall."
At his first word, she went and sat down under the porch, at
Hollingsworth's feet, entirely contented and happy. What charm was
there in his rude massiveness that so attracted and soothed this
shadow-like girl? It appeared to me, who have always been curious in
such matters, that Priscilla's vague and seemingly causeless flow of
felicitous feeling was that with which love blesses inexperienced
hearts, before they begin to suspect what is going on within them.
It transports them to the seventh heaven; and if you ask what brought
them thither, they neither can tell nor care to learn, but cherish an
ecstatic faith that there they shall abide forever.
Zenobia was in the doorway, not far from Hollingsworth. She gazed at
Priscilla in a very singular way. Indeed, it was a sight worth
gazing at, and a beautiful sight, too, as the fair girl sat at the
feet of that dark, powerful figure. Her air, while perfectly modest,
delicate, and virgin-like, denoted her as swayed by Hollingsworth,
attracted to him, and unconsciously seeking to rest upon his strength.
I could not turn away my own eyes, but hoped that nobody, save
Zenobia and myself, was witnessing this picture. It is before me now,
with the evening twilight a little deepened by the dusk of memory.
"Come hither, Priscilla," said Zenobia. "I have something to say to
you."
She spoke in little more than a whisper. But it is strange how
expressive of moods a whisper may often be. Priscilla felt at once
that something had gone wrong.
"Are you angry with me?" she asked, rising slowly, and standing
before Zenobia in a drooping attitude. "What have I done? I hope
you are not angry!"
"No, no, Priscilla!" said Hollingsworth, smiling. "I will answer for
it, she is not. You are the one little person in the world with whom
nobody can be angry!"
"Angry with you, child? What a silly idea!" exclaimed Zenobia,
laughing. "No, indeed! But, my dear Priscilla, you are getting to
be so very pretty that you absolutely need a duenna; and, as I am
older than you, and have had my own little experience of life, and
think myself exceedingly sage, I intend to fill the place of a maiden
aunt. Every day, I shall give you a lecture, a quarter of an hour in
length, on the morals, manners, and proprieties of social life. When
our pastoral shall be quite played out, Priscilla, my worldly wisdom
may stand you in good stead."
"I am afraid you are angry with me!" repeated Priscilla sadly; for,
while she seemed as impressible as wax, the girl often showed a
persistency in her own ideas as stubborn as it was gentle.
"Dear me, what can I say to the child!" cried Zenobia in a tone of
humorous vexation. "Well, well; since you insist on my being angry,
come to my room this moment, and let me beat you!"
Zenobia bade Hollingsworth good-night very sweetly, and nodded to me
with a smile. But, just as she turned aside with Priscilla into the
dimness of the porch, I caught another glance at her countenance. It
would have made the fortune of a tragic actress, could she have
borrowed it for the moment when she fumbles in her bosom for the
concealed dagger, or the exceedingly sharp bodkin, or mingles the
ratsbane in her lover's bowl of wine or her rival's cup of tea. Not
that I in the least anticipated any such catastrophe,--it being a
remarkable truth that custom has in no one point a greater sway than
over our modes of wreaking our wild passions. And besides, had we
been in Italy, instead of New England, it was hardly yet a crisis for
the dagger or the bowl.
It often amazed me, however, that Hollingsworth should show himself
so recklessly tender towards Priscilla, and never once seem to think
of the effect which it might have upon her heart. But the man, as I
have endeavored to explain, was thrown completely off his moral
balance, and quite bewildered as to his personal relations, by his
great excrescence of a philanthropic scheme. I used to see, or fancy,
indications that he was not altogether obtuse to Zenobia's influence
as a woman. No doubt, however, he had a still more exquisite
enjoyment of Priscilla's silent sympathy with his purposes, so
unalloyed with criticism, and therefore more grateful than any
intellectual approbation, which always involves a possible reserve of
latent censure. A man--poet, prophet, or whatever he may be--readily
persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily
tendered. In requital of so rich benefits as he was to confer upon
mankind, it would have been hard to deny Hollingsworth the simple
solace of a young girl's heart, which he held in his hand, and
smelled too, like a rosebud. But what if, while pressing out its
fragrance, he should crush the tender rosebud in his grasp!
As for Zenobia, I saw no occasion to give myself any trouble. With
her native strength, and her experience of the world, she could not
be supposed to need any help of mine. Nevertheless, I was really
generous enough to feel some little interest likewise for Zenobia.
With all her faults (which might have been a great many besides the
abundance that I knew of), she possessed noble traits, and a heart
which must, at least, have been valuable while new. And she seemed
ready to fling it away as uncalculatingly as Priscilla herself. I
could not but suspect that, if merely at play with Hollingsworth, she
was sporting with a power which she did not fully estimate. Or if in
earnest, it might chance, between Zenobia's passionate force and his
dark, self-delusive egotism, to turn out such earnest as would
develop itself in some sufficiently tragic catastrophe, though the
dagger and the bowl should go for nothing in it.
Meantime, the gossip of the Community set them down as a pair of
lovers. They took walks together, and were not seldom encountered in
the wood-paths: Hollingsworth deeply discoursing, in tones solemn and
sternly pathetic; Zenobia, with a rich glow on her cheeks, and her
eyes softened from their ordinary brightness, looked so beautiful,
that had her companion been ten times a philanthropist, it seemed
impossible but that one glance should melt him back into a man.
Oftener than anywhere else, they went to a certain point on the slope
of a pasture, commanding nearly the whole of our own domain, besides
a view of the river, and an airy prospect of many distant hills. The
bond of our Community was such, that the members had the privilege of
building cottages for their own residence within our precincts, thus
laying a hearthstone and fencing in a home private and peculiar to
all desirable extent, while yet the inhabitants should continue to
share the advantages of an associated life. It was inferred that
Hollingsworth and Zenobia intended to rear their dwelling on this
favorite spot.
I mentioned those rumors to Hollingsworth in a playful way.
"Had you consulted me," I went on to observe, "I should have
recommended a site farther to the left, just a little withdrawn into
the wood, with two or three peeps at the prospect among the trees.
You will be in the shady vale of years long before you can raise any
better kind of shade around your cottage, if you build it on this
bare slope."
"But I offer my edifice as a spectacle to the world," said
Hollingsworth, "that it may take example and build many another like
it. Therefore, I mean to set it on the open hillside."
Twist these words how I might, they offered no very satisfactory
import. It seemed hardly probable that Hollingsworth should care
about educating the public taste in the department of cottage
architecture, desirable as such improvement certainly was.
X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN
Hollingsworth and I--we had been hoeing potatoes, that forenoon,
while the rest of the fraternity were engaged in a distant quarter of
the farm--sat under a clump of maples, eating our eleven o'clock
lunch, when we saw a stranger approaching along the edge of the field.
He had admitted himself from the roadside through a turnstile, and
seemed to have a purpose of speaking with us.
And, by the bye, we were favored with many visits at Blithedale,
especially from people who sympathized with our theories, and perhaps
held themselves ready to unite in our actual experiment as soon as
there should appear a reliable promise of its success. It was rather
ludicrous, indeed (to me, at least, whose enthusiasm had insensibly
been exhaled together with the perspiration of many a hard day's
toil), it was absolutely funny, therefore, to observe what a glory
was shed about our life and labors, in the imaginations of these
longing proselytes. In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians,
besides being as practical as the hardest-fisted husbandmen in
Massachusetts. We did not, it is true, spend much time in piping to
our sheep, or warbling our innocent loves to the sisterhood. But
they gave us credit for imbuing the ordinary rustic occupations with
a kind of religious poetry, insomuch that our very cow-yards and
pig-sties were as delightfully fragrant as a flower garden. Nothing
used to please me more than to see one of these lay enthusiasts
snatch up a hoe, as they were very prone to do, and set to work with
a vigor that perhaps carried him through about a dozen ill-directed
strokes. Men are wonderfully soon satisfied, in this day of shameful
bodily enervation, when, from one end of life to the other, such
multitudes never taste the sweet weariness that follows accustomed
toil. I seldom saw the new enthusiasm that did not grow as flimsy
and flaccid as the proselyte's moistened shirt-collar, with a quarter
of an hour's active labor under a July sun.
But the person now at hand had not at all the air of one of these
amiable visionaries. He was an elderly man, dressed rather shabbily,
yet decently enough, in a gray frock-coat, faded towards a brown hue,
and wore a broad-brimmed white hat, of the fashion of several years
gone by. His hair was perfect silver, without a dark thread in the
whole of it; his nose, though it had a scarlet tip, by no means
indicated the jollity of which a red nose is the generally admitted
symbol. He was a subdued, undemonstrative old man, who would
doubtless drink a glass of liquor, now and then, and probably more
than was good for him,--not, however, with a purpose of undue
exhilaration, but in the hope of bringing his spirits up to the
ordinary level of the world's cheerfulness. Drawing nearer, there
was a shy look about him, as if he were ashamed of his poverty, or,
at any rate, for some reason or other, would rather have us glance at
him sidelong than take a full front view. He had a queer appearance
of hiding himself behind the patch on his left eye.
"I know this old gentleman," said I to Hollingsworth, as we sat
observing him; "that is, I have met him a hundred times in town, and
have often amused my fancy with wondering what he was before he came
to be what he is. He haunts restaurants and such places, and has an
odd way of lurking in corners or getting behind a door whenever
practicable, and holding out his hand with some little article in it
which he wishes you to buy. The eye of the world seems to trouble
him, although he necessarily lives so much in it. I never expected
to see him in an open field."
"Have you learned anything of his history?" asked Hollingsworth.
"Not a circumstance," I answered; "but there must be something
curious in it. I take him to be a harmless sort of a person, and a
tolerably honest one; but his manners, being so furtive, remind me of
those of a rat,--a rat without the mischief, the fierce eye, the
teeth to bite with, or the desire to bite. See, now! He means to
skulk along that fringe of bushes, and approach us on the other side
of our clump of maples."
We soon heard the old man's velvet tread on the grass, indicating
that he had arrived within a few feet of where we Sat.
"Good-morning, Mr. Moodie," said Hollingsworth, addressing the
stranger as an acquaintance; "you must have had a hot and tiresome
walk from the city. Sit down, and take a morsel of our bread and
cheese."
The visitor made a grateful little murmur of acquiescence, and sat
down in a spot somewhat removed; so that, glancing round, I could see
his gray pantaloons and dusty shoes, while his upper part was mostly
hidden behind the shrubbery. Nor did he come forth from this
retirement during the whole of the interview that followed. We
handed him such food as we had, together with a brown jug of molasses
and water (would that it had been brandy, or some thing better, for
the sake of his chill old heart!), like priests offering dainty
sacrifice to an enshrined and invisible idol. I have no idea that he
really lacked sustenance; but it was quite touching, nevertheless, to
hear him nibbling away at our crusts.
"Mr. Moodie," said I, "do you remember selling me one of those very
pretty little silk purses, of which you seem to have a monopoly in
the market? I keep it to this day, I can assure you."
"Ah, thank you," said our guest. "Yes, Mr. Coverdale, I used to sell
a good many of those little purses."
He spoke languidly, and only those few words, like a watch with an
inelastic spring, that just ticks a moment or two and stops again.
He seemed a very forlorn old man. In the wantonness of youth,
strength, and comfortable condition,--making my prey of people's
individualities, as my custom was,--I tried to identify my mind with
the old fellow's, and take his view of the world, as if looking
through a smoke-blackened glass at the sun. It robbed the landscape
of all its life. Those pleasantly swelling slopes of our farm,
descending towards the wide meadows, through which sluggishly circled
the brimful tide of the Charles, bathing the long sedges on its
hither and farther shores; the broad, sunny gleam over the winding
water; that peculiar picturesqueness of the scene where capes and
headlands put themselves boldly forth upon the perfect level of the
meadow, as into a green lake, with inlets between the promontories;
the shadowy woodland, with twinkling showers of light falling into
its depths; the sultry heat-vapor, which rose everywhere like incense,
and in which my soul delighted, as indicating so rich a fervor in
the passionate day, and in the earth that was burning with its love,--
I beheld all these things as through old Moodie's eyes. When my
eyes are dimmer than they have yet come to be, I will go thither
again, and see if I did not catch the tone of his mind aright, and if
the cold and lifeless tint of his perceptions be not then repeated in
my own.
Yet it was unaccountable to myself, the interest that I felt in him.
"Have you any objection," said I, "to telling me who made those
little purses?"
"Gentlemen have often asked me that," said Moodie slowly; "but I
shake my head, and say little or nothing, and creep out of the way as
well as I can. I am a man of few words; and if gentlemen were to be
told one thing, they would be very apt, I suppose, to ask me another.
But it happens just now, Mr. Coverdale, that you can tell me more
about the maker of those little purses than I can tell you."
"Why do you trouble him with needless questions, Coverdale?"
interrupted Hollingsworth. "You must have known, long ago, that it
was Priscilla. And so, my good friend, you have come to see her?
Well, I am glad of it. You will find her altered very much for the
better, since that winter evening when you put her into my charge.
Why, Priscilla has a bloom in her cheeks, now!"
"Has my pale little girl a bloom?" repeated Moodie with a kind of
slow wonder. "Priscilla with a bloom in her cheeks! Ah, I am afraid
I shall not know my little girl. And is she happy?"
"Just as happy as a bird," answered Hollingsworth.
"Then, gentlemen," said our guest apprehensively," I don't think it
well for me to go any farther. I crept hitherward only to ask about
Priscilla; and now that you have told me such good news, perhaps I
can do no better than to creep back again. If she were to see this
old face of mine, the child would remember some very sad times which
we have spent together. Some very sad times, indeed! She has
forgotten them, I know,--them and me,--else she could not be so happy,
nor have a bloom in her cheeks. Yes--yes--yes," continued he, still
with the same torpid utterance; "with many thanks to you, Mr.
Hollingsworth, I will creep back to town again."
"You shall do no such thing, Mr. Moodie," said Hollingsworth bluffly.
"Priscilla often speaks of you; and if there lacks anything to make
her cheeks bloom like two damask roses, I'll venture to say it is
just the sight of your face. Come,--we will go and find her."
"Mr. Hollingsworth!" said the old man in his hesitating way.
"Well," answered Hollingsworth.
"Has there been any call for Priscilla?" asked Moodie; and though his
face was hidden from us, his tone gave a sure indication of the
mysterious nod and wink with which he put the question. "You know, I
think, sir, what I mean."
"I have not the remotest suspicion what you mean, Mr. Moodie,"
replied Hollingsworth; "nobody, to my knowledge, has called for
Priscilla, except yourself. But come; we are losing time, and I have
several things to say to you by the way."
"And, Mr. Hollingsworth!" repeated Moodie.
"Well, again!" cried my friend rather impatiently. "What now?"
"There is a lady here," said the old man; and his voice lost some of
its wearisome hesitation. "You will account it a very strange matter
for me to talk about; but I chanced to know this lady when she was
but a little child. If I am rightly informed, she has grown to be a
very fine woman, and makes a brilliant figure in the world, with her
beauty, and her talents, and her noble way of spending her riches. I
should recognize this lady, so people tell me, by a magnificent
flower in her hair."
"What a rich tinge it gives to his colorless ideas, when he speaks of
Zenobia!" I whispered to Hollingsworth. "But how can there possibly
be any interest or connecting link between him and her?"
"The old man, for years past," whispered Hollingsworth, "has been a
little out of his right mind, as you probably see."
"What I would inquire," resumed Moodie, "is whether this beautiful
lady is kind to my poor Priscilla."
"Very kind," said Hollingsworth.
"Does she love her?" asked Moodie.
"It should seem so," answered my friend. "They are always together."
"Like a gentlewoman and her maid-servant, I fancy?" suggested the old
man.
There was something so singular in his way of saying this, that I
could not resist the impulse to turn quite round, so as to catch a
glimpse of his face, almost imagining that I should see another
person than old Moodie. But there he sat, with the patched side of
his face towards me.
"Like an elder and younger sister, rather," replied Hollingsworth.
"Ah!" said Moodie more complacently, for his latter tones had
harshness and acidity in them,--"it would gladden my old heart to
witness that. If one thing would make me happier than another, Mr.
Hollingsworth, it would be to see that beautiful lady holding my
little girl by the hand."
"Come along," said Hollingsworth, "and perhaps you may."
After a little more delay on the part of our freakish visitor, they
set forth together, old Moodie keeping a step or two behind
Hollingsworth, so that the latter could not very conveniently look
him in the face. I remained under the tuft of maples, doing my
utmost to draw an inference from the scene that had just passed. In
spite of Hollingsworth's off-hand explanation, it did not strike me
that our strange guest was really beside himself, but only that his
mind needed screwing up, like an instrument long out of tune, the
strings of which have ceased to vibrate smartly and sharply.
Methought it would be profitable for us, projectors of a happy life,
to welcome this old gray shadow, and cherish him as one of us, and
let him creep about our domain, in order that he might be a little
merrier for our sakes, and we, sometimes, a little sadder for his.
Human destinies look ominous without some perceptible intermixture of
the sable or the gray. And then, too, should any of our fraternity
grow feverish with an over-exulting sense of prosperity, it would be
a sort of cooling regimen to slink off into the woods, and spend an
hour, or a day, or as many days as might be requisite to the cure, in
uninterrupted communion with this deplorable old Moodie!
Going homeward to dinner, I had a glimpse of him, behind the trunk of
a tree, gazing earnestly towards a particular window of the farmhouse;
and by and by Priscilla appeared at this window, playfully drawing
along Zenobia, who looked as bright as the very day that was blazing
down upon us, only not, by many degrees, so well advanced towards her
noon. I was convinced that this pretty sight must have been
purposely arranged by Priscilla for the old man to see. But either
the girl held her too long, or her fondness was resented as too great
a freedom; for Zenobia suddenly put Priscilla decidedly away, and
gave her a haughty look, as from a mistress to a dependant. Old
Moodie shook his head; and again and again I saw him shake it, as he
withdrew along the road; and at the last point whence the farmhouse
was visible, he turned and shook his uplifted staff.
XI. THE WOOD-PATH
Not long after the preceding incident, in order to get the ache of
too constant labor out of my bones, and to relieve my spirit of the
irksomeness of a settled routine, I took a holiday. It was my
purpose to spend it all alone, from breakfast-time till twilight, in
the deepest wood-seclusion that lay anywhere around us. Though fond
of society, I was so constituted as to need these occasional
retirements, even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself
characterized by a remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a
yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I
lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of
little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss (a
thing whose life is in the shade, the rain, or the noontide dew),
crumbling in the sunshine after long expectance of a shower. So,
with my heart full of a drowsy pleasure, and cautious not to
dissipate my mood by previous intercourse with any one, I hurried
away, and was soon pacing a wood-path, arched overhead with
boughs, and dusky-brown beneath my feet.
At first I walked very swiftly, as if the heavy flood tide of social
life were roaring at my heels, and would outstrip and overwhelm me,
without all the better diligence in my escape. But, threading the
more distant windings of the track, I abated my pace, and looked
about me for some side-aisle, that should admit me into the innermost
sanctuary of this green cathedral, just as, in human acquaintanceship,
a casual opening sometimes lets us, all of a sudden, into the
long-sought intimacy of a mysterious heart. So much was I absorbed
in my reflections,--or, rather, in my mood, the substance of which
was as yet too shapeless to be called thought,--that footsteps
rustled on the leaves, and a figure passed me by, almost without
impressing either the sound or sight upon my consciousness.
A moment afterwards, I heard a voice at a little distance behind me,
speaking so sharply and impertinently that it made a complete discord
with my spiritual state, and caused the latter to vanish as abruptly
as when you thrust a finger into a soap-bubble.
"Halloo, friend!" cried this most unseasonable voice. "Stop a moment,
I say! I must have a word with you!"
I turned about, in a humor ludicrously irate. In the first place,
the interruption, at any rate, was a grievous injury; then, the tone
displeased me. And finally, unless there be real affection in his
heart, a man cannot,--such is the bad state to which the world has
brought itself,--cannot more effectually show his contempt for a
brother mortal, nor more gallingly assume a position of superiority,
than by addressing him as "friend." Especially does the
misapplication of this phrase bring out that latent hostility which
is sure to animate peculiar sects, and those who, with however
generous a purpose, have sequestered themselves from the crowd; a
feeling, it is true, which may be hidden in some dog-kennel of the
heart, grumbling there in the darkness, but is never quite extinct,
until the dissenting party have gained power and scope enough to
treat the world generously. For my part, I should have taken it as
far less an insult to be styled "fellow," "clown," or "bumpkin." To
either of these appellations my rustic garb (it was a linen blouse,
with checked shirt and striped pantaloons, a chip hat on my head, and
a rough hickory stick in my hand) very fairly entitled me. As the
case stood, my temper darted at once to the opposite pole; not friend,
but enemy!
"What do you want with me?" said I, facing about.
"Come a little nearer, friend," said the stranger, beckoning.
"No," answered I. "If I can do anything for you without too much
trouble to myself, say so. But recollect, if you please, that you
are not speaking to an acquaintance, much less a friend!"
"Upon my word, I believe not!" retorted he, looking at me with some
curiosity; and, lifting his hat, he made me a salute which had enough
of sarcasm to be offensive, and just enough of doubtful courtesy to
render any resentment of it absurd. "But I ask your pardon! I
recognize a little mistake. If I may take the liberty to suppose it,
you, sir, are probably one of the aesthetic--or shall I rather say
ecstatic?--laborers, who have planted themselves hereabouts. This is
your forest of Arden; and you are either the banished Duke in person,
or one of the chief nobles in his train. The melancholy Jacques,
perhaps? Be it so. In that case, you can probably do me a favor."
I never, in my life, felt less inclined to confer a favor on any man.
"I am busy," said I.
So unexpectedly had the stranger made me sensible of his presence,
that he had almost the effect of an apparition; and certainly a less
appropriate one (taking into view the dim woodland solitude about us)
than if the salvage man of antiquity, hirsute and cinctured with a
leafy girdle, had started out of a thicket. He was still young,
seemingly a little under thirty, of a tall and well-developed figure,
and as handsome a man as ever I beheld. The style of his beauty,
however, though a masculine style, did not at all commend itself to
my taste. His countenance--I hardly know how to describe the
peculiarity--had an indecorum in it, a kind of rudeness, a hard,
coarse, forth-putting freedom of expression, which no degree of
external polish could have abated one single jot. Not that it was
vulgar. But he had no fineness of nature; there was in his eyes
(although they might have artifice enough of another sort) the naked
exposure of something that ought not to be left prominent. With
these vague allusions to what I have seen in other faces as well as
his, I leave the quality to be comprehended best--because with an
intuitive repugnance--by those who possess least of it.
His hair, as well as his beard and mustache, was coal-black; his eyes,
too, were black and sparkling, and his teeth remarkably brilliant.
He was rather carelessly but well and fashionably dressed, in a
summer-morning costume. There was a gold chain, exquisitely wrought,
across his vest. I never saw a smoother or whiter gloss than that
upon his shirt-bosom, which had a pin in it, set with a gem that
glimmered, in the leafy shadow where he stood, like a living tip of
fire. He carried a stick with a wooden head, carved in vivid
imitation of that of a serpent. I hated him, partly, I do believe,
from a comparison of my own homely garb with his well-ordered
foppishness.
"Well, sir," said I, a little ashamed of my first irritation, but
still with no waste of civility, "be pleased to speak at once, as I
have my own business in hand."
"I regret that my mode of addressing you was a little unfortunate,"
said the stranger, smiling; for he seemed a very acute sort of person,
and saw, in some degree, how I stood affected towards him. "I
intended no offence, and shall certainly comport myself with due
ceremony hereafter. I merely wish to make a few inquiries respecting
a lady, formerly of my acquaintance, who is now resident in your
Community, and, I believe,
largely concerned in your social enterprise. You call her, I think,
Zenobia."
"That is her name in literature," observed I; "a name, too, which
possibly she may permit her private friends to know and address her
by,--but not one which they feel at liberty to recognize when used of
her personally by a stranger or casual acquaintance."
"Indeed!" answered this disagreeable person; and he turned aside his
face for an instant with a brief laugh, which struck me as a
noteworthy expression of his character. "Perhaps I might put forward
a claim, on your own grounds, to call the lady by a name so
appropriate to her splendid qualities. But I am willing to know her
by any cognomen that you may suggest."
Heartily wishing that he would be either a little more offensive, or
a good deal less so, or break off our intercourse altogether, I
mentioned Zenobia's real name.
"True," said he; "and in general society I have never heard her
called otherwise. And, after all, our discussion of the point has
been gratuitous. My object is only to inquire when, where, and how
this lady may most conveniently be seen."
"At her present residence, of course," I replied. "You have but to
go thither and ask for her. This very path will lead you within
sight of the house; so I wish you good-morning."
"One moment, if you please," said the stranger. "The course you
indicate would certainly be the proper one, in an ordinary morning
call. But my business is private, personal, and somewhat peculiar.
Now, in a community like this, I should judge that any little
occurrence is likely to be discussed rather more minutely than would
quite suit my views. I refer solely to myself, you understand, and
without intimating that it would be other than a matter of entire
indifference to the lady. In short, I especially desire to see her
in private. If her habits are such as I have known them, she is
probably often to be met with in the woods, or by the river-side; and
I think you could do me the favor to point out some favorite walk,
where, about this hour, I might be fortunate enough to gain an
interview."
I reflected that it would be quite a supererogatory piece of
Quixotism in me to undertake the guardianship of Zenobia, who, for my
pains, would only make me the butt of endless ridicule, should the
fact ever come to her knowledge. I therefore described a spot which,
as often as any other, was Zenobia's resort at this period of the day;
nor was it so remote from the farmhouse as to leave her in much
peril, whatever might be the stranger's character.
"A single word more," said he; and his black eyes sparkled at me,
whether with fun or malice I knew not, but certainly as if the Devil
were peeping out of them. "Among your fraternity, I understand,
there is a certain holy and benevolent blacksmith; a man of iron, in
more senses than one; a rough, cross-grained, well-meaning individual,
rather boorish in his manners, as might be expected, and by no means
of the highest intellectual cultivation. He is a philanthropical
lecturer, with two or three disciples, and a scheme of his own, the
preliminary step in which involves a large purchase of land, and the
erection of a spacious edifice, at an expense considerably beyond his
means; inasmuch as these are to be reckoned in copper or old iron
much more conveniently than in gold or silver. He hammers away upon
his one topic as lustily as ever he did upon a horseshoe! Do you
know such a person?" I shook my head, and was turning away. "Our
friend," he continued, "is described to me as a brawny, shaggy, grim,
and ill-favored personage, not particularly well calculated, one
would say, to insinuate himself with the softer sex. Yet, so far has
this honest fellow succeeded with one lady whom we wot of, that he
anticipates, from her abundant resources, the necessary funds for
realizing his plan in brick and mortar!"
Here the stranger seemed to be so much amused with his sketch of
Hollingsworth's character and purposes, that he burst into a fit of
merriment, of the same nature as the brief, metallic laugh already
alluded to, but immensely prolonged and enlarged. In the excess of
his delight, he opened his mouth wide, and disclosed a gold band
around the upper part of his teeth, thereby making it apparent that
every one of his brilliant grinders and incisors was a sham. This
discovery affected me very oddly.
I felt as if the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his
wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a
mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a
wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him
save the wicked expression of his grin. The fantasy of his spectral
character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his
strange mirth on my sympathies, that I soon began to laugh as loudly
as himself.
By and by, he paused all at once; so suddenly, indeed, that my own
cachinnation lasted a moment longer.
"Ah, excuse me!" said he. "Our interview seems to proceed more
merrily than it began."
"It ends here," answered I. "And I take shame to myself that my folly
has lost me the right of resenting your ridicule of a friend."
"Pray allow me," said the stranger, approaching a step nearer, and
laying his gloved hand on my sleeve. "One other favor I must ask of
you. You have a young person here at Blithedale, of whom I have
heard,--whom, perhaps, I have known,--and in whom, at all events, I
take a peculiar interest. She is one of those delicate, nervous
young creatures, not uncommon in New England, and whom I suppose to
have become what we find them by the gradual refining away of the
physical system among your women. Some philosophers choose to
glorify this habit of body by terming it spiritual; but, in my
opinion, it is rather the effect of unwholesome food, bad air, lack
of outdoor exercise, and neglect of bathing, on the part of these
damsels and their female progenitors, all resulting in a kind of
hereditary dyspepsia. Zenobia, even with her uncomfortable surplus
of vitality, is far the better model of womanhood. But--to revert
again to this young person--she goes among you by the name of
Priscilla. Could you possibly afford me the means of speaking with
her?"
"You have made so many inquiries of me," I observed, "that I may at
least trouble you with one. What is your name?"
He offered me a card, with "Professor Westervelt" engraved on it. At
the same time, as if to vindicate his claim to the professorial
dignity, so often assumed on very questionable grounds, he put on a
pair of spectacles, which so altered the character of his face that I
hardly knew him again. But I liked the present aspect no better than
the former one.
"I must decline any further connection with your affairs," said I,
drawing back. "I have told you where to find Zenobia. As for
Priscilla, she has closer friends than myself, through whom, if they
see fit, you can gain access to her."
"In that case," returned the Professor, ceremoniously raising his hat,
"good-morning to you."
He took his departure, and was soon out of sight among the windings
of the wood-path. But after a little reflection, I could not help
regretting that I had so peremptorily broken off the interview, while
the stranger seemed inclined to continue it. His evident knowledge
of matters affecting my three friends might have led to disclosures
or inferences that would perhaps have been serviceable. I was
particularly struck with the fact that, ever since the appearance of
Priscilla, it had been the tendency of events to suggest and
establish a connection between Zenobia and her. She had come, in the
first instance, as if with the sole purpose of claiming Zenobia's
protection. Old Moodie's visit, it appeared, was chiefly to
ascertain whether this object had been accomplished. And here,
to-day, was the questionable Professor, linking one with the other in
his inquiries, and seeking communication with both.
Meanwhile, my inclination for a ramble having been balked, I lingered
in the vicinity of the farm, with perhaps a vague idea that some new
event would grow out of Westervelt's proposed interview with Zenobia.
My own part in these transactions was singularly subordinate. It
resembled that
of the Chorus in a classic play, which seems to be set aloof from the
possibility of personal concernment, and bestows the whole measure of
its hope or fear, its exultation or sorrow, on the fortunes of others,
between whom and itself this sympathy is the only bond. Destiny, it
may be,--the most skilful of stage managers,--seldom chooses to
arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the
presence of at least one calm observer. It is his office to give
applause when due, and sometimes an inevitable tear, to detect the
final fitness of incident to character, and distil in his
long-brooding thought the whole morality of the performance.
Not to be out of the way in case there were need of me in my vocation,
and, at the same time, to avoid thrusting myself where neither
destiny nor mortals might desire my presence, I remained pretty near
the verge of the woodlands. My position was off the track of
Zenobia's customary walk, yet not so remote but that a recognized
occasion might speedily have brought me thither.
XII. COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE
Long since, in this part of our circumjacent wood, I had found out
for myself a little hermitage. It was a kind of leafy cave, high
upward into the air, among the midmost branches of a white-pine tree.
A wild grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and
twisted itself up into the tree, and, after wreathing the
entanglement of its tendrils around almost every bough, had caught
hold of three or four neighboring
trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable knot
of polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from a summer shower, the
fancy had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly impervious mass
of foliage. The branches yielded me a passage, and closed again
beneath, as if only a squirrel or a bird had passed. Far aloft,
around the stem of the central pine, behold a perfect nest for
Robinson Crusoe or King Charles! A hollow chamber of rare seclusion
had been formed by the decay of some of the pine branches, which the
vine had lovingly strangled with its embrace, burying them from the
light of day in an aerial sepulchre of its own leaves. It cost me
but little ingenuity to enlarge the interior, and open loopholes
through the verdant walls. Had it ever been my fortune to spend a
honeymoon, I should have thought seriously of inviting my bride up
thither, where our next neighbors would have been two orioles in
another part of the clump.
It was an admirable place to make verses, tuning the rhythm to the
breezy symphony that so often stirred among the vine leaves; or to
meditate an essay for "The Dial," in which the many tongues of Nature
whispered mysteries, and seemed to ask only a little stronger puff of
wind to speak out the solution of its riddle. Being so pervious to
air-currents, it was just the nook, too, for the enjoyment of a cigar.
This hermitage was my one exclusive possession while I counted
myself a brother of the socialists. It symbolized my individuality,
and aided me in keeping it inviolate. None ever found me out in it,
except, once, a squirrel. I brought thither no guest, because, after
Hollingsworth failed me, there was no longer the man alive with whom
I could think of sharing all. So there I used to sit, owl-like, yet
not without liberal and hospitable thoughts. I counted the
innumerable clusters of my vine, and fore-reckoned the abundance of
my vintage. It gladdened me to anticipate the surprise of the
Community, when, like an allegorical figure of rich October, I should
make my appearance, with shoulders bent beneath the burden of ripe
grapes, and some of the crushed ones crimsoning my brow as with a
bloodstain.
Ascending into this natural turret, I peeped in turn out of several
of its small windows. The pine-tree, being ancient, rose high above
the rest of the wood, which was of comparatively recent growth. Even
where I sat, about midway between the root and the topmost bough, my
position was lofty enough to serve as an observatory, not for starry
investigations, but for those sublunary matters in which lay a lore
as infinite as that of the planets. Through one loophole I saw the
river lapsing calmly onward, while in the meadow, near its brink, a
few of the brethren were digging peat for our winter's fuel. On the
interior cart-road of our farm I discerned Hollingsworth, with a yoke
of oxen hitched to a drag of stones, that were to be piled into a
fence, on which we employed ourselves at the odd intervals of other
labor. The harsh tones of his voice, shouting to the sluggish steers,
made me sensible, even at such a distance, that he was ill at ease,
and that the balked philanthropist had the battle-spirit in his heart.
"Haw, Buck!" quoth he. "Come along there, ye lazy ones! What are ye
about, now? Gee!"
"Mankind, in Hollingsworth's opinion," thought I, "is but another
yoke of oxen, as stubborn, stupid, and sluggish as our old Brown and
Bright. He vituperates us aloud, and curses us in his heart, and
will begin to prick us with the goad-stick, by and by. But are we
his oxen? And what right has he to be the driver? And why, when
there is enough else to do, should we waste our strength in dragging
home the ponderous load of his philanthropic absurdities? At my
height above the earth, the whole matter looks ridiculous!"
Turning towards the farmhouse, I saw Priscilla (for, though a great
way off, the eye of faith assured me that it was she) sitting at
Zenobia's window, and making little purses, I suppose; or, perhaps,
mending the Community's old linen. A bird flew past my tree; and, as
it clove its way onward into the sunny atmosphere, I flung it a
message for Priscilla.
"Tell her," said I, "that her fragile thread of life has inextricably
knotted itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it
will be broken. Tell her that Zenobia will not be long her friend.
Say that Hollingsworth's heart is on fire with his own purpose, but
icy for all human affection; and that, if she has given him her love,
it is like casting a flower into a sepulchre. And say that if any
mortal really cares for her, it is myself; and not even I for her
realities,--poor little seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her!--
but for the fancy-work with which I have idly decked her out!"
The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to
my nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche. Many trees
mingled their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor. Possibly there
was a sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath
me. It may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found
myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism,
and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world.
Our especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could
take in with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was
impossible not to laugh aloud.
"But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I. "If I were wise, I
should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my
companions for remaining in it."
While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in
the wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of
the disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt. It brought
my thoughts back to our recent interview. I recognized as chiefly
due to this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which
just now had filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better
purposes. And it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was
looking at Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream,
and at the noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at
Priscilla, whose impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease
and beauty. The essential charm of each had vanished. There are
some spheres the contact with which inevitably degrades the high,
debases the pure, deforms the beautiful. It must be a mind of
uncommon strength, and little impressibility, that can permit itself
the habit of such intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated;
and yet the Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at
large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual
aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of
man; and all the more because a part of my own nature showed itself
responsive to him.
Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay
in the vicinity of my tree. Soon I caught glimpses of two figures--a
woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together
as they advanced.
Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while,
a flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their
light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle
from some bright object on the ground. Her gestures were free, and
strikingly impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate
intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty
culminated. Any passion would have become her well; and passionate
love, perhaps, the best of all. This was not love, but anger,
largely intermixed with scorn. Yet the idea strangely forced itself
upon me, that there was a sort of familiarity between these two
companions, necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's
part, at least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into
as intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As they passed among the
trees, reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the
hem of her garment should not brush against the stranger's person. I
wondered whether there had always been a chasm, guarded so
religiously, betwixt these two.
As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion
than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have
been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity,
tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his
intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He
failed to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why
Zenobia should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied his mind
that it was all folly, and only another shape of a woman's manifold
absurdity, which men can never understand. How many a woman's evil
fate has yoked her with a man like this! Nature thrusts some of us
into the world miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with
hardly any sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals. No
passion, save of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor the delicacy
that results from this. Externally they bear a close resemblance to
other men, and have perhaps all save the finest grace; but when a
woman wrecks herself on such a being, she ultimately finds that the
real womanhood within her has no corresponding part in him. Her
deepest voice lacks a response; the deeper her cry, the more dead his
silence. The fault may be none of his; he cannot give her what never
lived within his soul. But the wretchedness on her side, and the
moral deterioration attendant on a false and shallow life, without
strength enough to keep itself sweet, are among the most pitiable
wrongs that mortals suffer.
Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and woman,--
outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering like two lovers in the
wood,--I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might
have fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her
passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake,
here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which
distinguished the more public portion of her life.
Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I began to think it
the design of fate to let me into all Zenobia's secrets, and that
therefore the couple would sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a
conversation which would leave me nothing to inquire. No doubt,
however, had it so happened, I should have deemed myself honorably
bound to warn them of a listener's presence by flinging down a
handful of unripe grapes, or by sending an unearthly groan out of my
hiding-place, as if this were one of the trees of Dante's ghostly
forest. But real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance.
In the first place, they did not sit down at all. Secondly, even
while they passed beneath the tree, Zenobia's utterance was so hasty
and broken, and Westervelt's so cool and low, that I hardly could
make out an intelligible sentence on either side. What I seem to
remember, I yet suspect, may have been patched together by my fancy,
in brooding over the matter afterwards.
"Why not fling the girl off," said Westervelt, "and let her go?"
"She clung to me from the first," replied Zenobia. "I neither know
nor care what it is in me that so attaches her. But she loves me,
and I will not fail her."
"She will plague you, then," said he, "in more ways than one."
"The poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia. "She can do me neither good nor
harm. How should she?"
I know not what reply Westervelt whispered; nor did Zenobia's
subsequent exclamation give me any clew, except that it evidently
inspired her with horror and disgust.
"With what kind of a being am I linked?" cried she. "If my Creator
cares aught for my soul, let him release me from this miserable bond!"
"I did not think it weighed so heavily," said her companion..
"Nevertheless," answered Zenobia, "it will strangle me at last!"
And then I heard her utter a helpless sort of moan; a sound which,
struggling out of the heart of a person of her pride and strength,
affected me more than if she had made the wood dolorously vocal with
a thousand shrieks and wails.
Other mysterious words, besides what are above written, they spoke
together; but I understood no more, and even question whether I
fairly understood so much as this. By long brooding over our
recollections, we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary
stuff, and hardly capable of being distinguished from it. In a few
moments they were completely beyond ear-shot. A breeze stirred after
them, and awoke the leafy tongues of the surrounding trees, which
forthwith began to babble, as if innumerable gossips had all at once
got wind of Zenobia's secret. But, as the breeze grew stronger, its
voice among the branches was as if it said, "Hush! Hush!" and I
resolved that to no mortal would I disclose what I had heard. And,
though there might be room for casuistry, such, I conceive, is the
most equitable rule in all similar conjunctures.
XIII. ZENOBIA'S LEGEND
The illustrious Society of Blithedale, though it toiled in downright
earnest for the good of mankind, yet not unfrequently illuminated its
laborious life with an afternoon or evening of pastime. Picnics
under the trees were considerably in vogue; and, within doors,
fragmentary bits of theatrical performance, such as single acts of
tragedy or comedy, or dramatic proverbs and charades. Zenobia,
besides, was fond of giving us readings from Shakespeare, and often
with a depth of tragic power, or breadth of comic effect, that made
one feel it an intolerable wrong to the world that she did not at
once go upon the stage. Tableaux vivants were another of our
occasional modes of amusement, in which scarlet shawls, old silken
robes, ruffs, velvets, furs, and all kinds of miscellaneous trumpery
converted our familiar companions into the people of a pictorial
world. We had been thus engaged on the evening after the incident
narrated in the last chapter. Several splendid works of art--either
arranged after engravings from the old masters, or original
illustrations of scenes in history or romance--had been presented,
and we were earnestly entreating Zenobia for more.
She stood with a meditative air, holding a large piece of gauze, or
some such ethereal stuff, as if considering what picture should next
occupy the frame; while at her feet lay a heap of many-colored
garments, which her quick fancy and magic skill could so easily
convert into gorgeous draperies for heroes and princesses.
"I am getting weary of this," said she, after a moment's thought.
"Our own features, and our own figures and airs, show a little too
intrusively through all the characters we assume. We have so much
familiarity with
one another's realities, that we cannot remove ourselves, at pleasure,
into an imaginary sphere. Let us have no more pictures to-night;
but, to make you what poor amends I can, how would you like to have
me trump up a wild, spectral legend, on the spur of the moment?"
Zenobia had the gift of telling a fanciful little story, off-hand, in
a way that made it greatly more effective than it was usually found
to be when she afterwards elaborated the same production with her pen.
Her proposal, therefore, was greeted with acclamation.
"Oh, a story, a story, by all means!" cried the young girls. "No
matter how marvellous; we will believe it, every word. And let it be
a ghost story, if you please."
"No, not exactly a ghost story," answered Zenobia; "but something so
nearly like it that you shall hardly tell the difference. And,
Priscilla, stand you before me, where I may look at you, and get my
inspiration out of your eyes. They are very deep and dreamy to-night."
I know not whether the following version of her story will retain any
portion of its pristine character; but, as Zenobia told it wildly and
rapidly, hesitating at no extravagance, and dashing at absurdities
which I am too timorous to repeat,--giving it the varied emphasis of
her inimitable voice, and the pictorial illustration of her mobile
face, while through it all we caught the freshest aroma of the
thoughts, as they came bubbling out of her mind,--thus narrated, and
thus heard, the legend seemed quite a remarkable affair. I scarcely
knew, at the time, whether she intended us to laugh or be more
seriously impressed. From beginning to end, it was undeniable
nonsense, but not necessarily the worse for that.
THE SILVERY VEIL
You have heard, my dear friends, of the Veiled Lady, who grew
suddenly so very famous, a few months ago. And have you never
thought how remarkable it was that this marvellous creature should
vanish, all at once, while her renown was on the increase, before the
public had grown weary of her, and when the enigma of her character,
instead of being solved, presented itself more mystically at every
exhibition? Her last appearance, as you know, was before a crowded
audience. The next evening,--although the bills had announced her,
at the corner of every street, in red letters of a gigantic size,--
there was no Veiled Lady to be seen! Now, listen to my simple
little tale, and you shall hear the very latest incident in the known
life--(if life it may be called, which seemed to have no more reality
than the candle-light image of one's self which peeps at us outside
of a dark windowpane)--the life of this shadowy phenomenon.
A party of young gentlemen, you are to understand, were enjoying
themselves, one afternoon,--as young gentlemen are sometimes fond of
doing,--over a bottle or two of champagne; and, among other ladies
less mysterious, the subject of the Veiled Lady, as was very natural,
happened to come up before them for discussion. She rose, as it were,
with the sparkling effervescence of their wine, and appeared in a
more airy and fantastic light on account of the medium through which
they saw her. They repeated to one another, between jest and earnest,
all the wild stories that were in vogue; nor, I presume, did they
hesitate to add any small circumstance that the inventive whim of the
moment might suggest, to heighten the marvellousness of their theme.
"But what an audacious report was that," observed one, "which
pretended to assert the identity of this strange creature with a
young lady,"--and here he mentioned her name,--"the daughter of one
of our most distinguished families!"
"Ah, there is more in that story than can well be accounted for,"
remarked another. "I have it on good authority, that the young lady
in question is invariably out of sight, and not to be traced, even by
her own family, at the hours when the Veiled Lady is before the
public; nor can any satisfactory explanation be given of her
disappearance. And just look at the thing: Her brother is a young
fellow of spirit. He cannot but be aware of these rumors in
reference to his sister. Why, then, does he not come forward to
defend her character, unless he is conscious that an investigation
would only make the matter worse?"
It is essential to the purposes of my legend to distinguish one of
these young gentlemen from his companions; so, for the sake of a soft
and pretty name (such as we of the literary sisterhood invariably
bestow upon our heroes), I deem it fit to call him Theodore.
"Pshaw!" exclaimed Theodore; "her brother is no such fool! Nobody,
unless his brain be as full of bubbles as this wine, can seriously
think of crediting that ridiculous rumor. Why, if my senses did not
play me false (which never was the case yet), I affirm that I saw
that very lady, last evening, at the exhibition, while this veiled
phenomenon was playing off her juggling tricks! What can you say to
that?"
"Oh, it was a spectral illusion that you saw!" replied his friends,
with a general laugh. "The Veiled Lady is quite up to such a thing."
However, as the above-mentioned fable could not hold its ground
against Theodore's downright refutation, they went on to speak of
other stories which the wild babble of the town had set afloat. Some
upheld that the veil covered the most beautiful countenance in the
world; others,--and certainly with more reason, considering the sex
of the Veiled Lady,--that the face was the most hideous and horrible,
and that this was her sole motive for hiding it. It was the face of
a corpse; it was the head of a skeleton; it was a monstrous visage,
with snaky locks, like Medusa's, and one great red eye in the centre
of the forehead. Again, it was affirmed that there was no single and
unchangeable set of features beneath the veil; but that whosoever
should be bold enough to lift it would behold the features of that
person, in all the world, who was destined to be his fate; perhaps he
would be greeted by the tender smile of the woman whom he loved, or,
quite as probably, the deadly scowl of his bitterest enemy would
throw a blight over his life. They quoted, moreover, this startling
explanation of the whole affair: that the magician who exhibited the
Veiled Lady--and who, by the bye, was the handsomest man in the whole
world--had bartered his own soul for seven years' possession of a
familiar fiend, and that the last year of the contract was wearing
towards its close.
If it were worth our while, I could keep you till an hour beyond
midnight listening to a thousand such absurdities as these. But
finally our friend Theodore, who prided himself upon his common-sense,
found the matter getting quite beyond his patience.
"I offer any wager you like," cried he, setting down his glass so
forcibly as to break the stem of it, "that this very evening I find
out the mystery of the Veiled Lady!"
Young men, I am told, boggle at nothing over their wine; so, after a
little more talk, a wager of considerable amount was actually laid,
the money staked, and Theodore left to choose his own method of
settling the dispute.
How he managed it I know not, nor is it of any great importance to
this veracious legend. The most natural way, to be sure, was by
bribing the doorkeeper,--or possibly he preferred clambering in at
the window. But, at any rate, that very evening, while the
exhibition was going forward in the hall, Theodore contrived to gain
admittance into the private withdrawing-room whither the Veiled Lady
was accustomed to retire at the close of her performances. There he
waited, listening, I suppose, to the stifled hum of the great
audience; and no doubt he could distinguish the deep tones of the
magician, causing the wonders that he wrought to appear more dark and
intricate, by his mystic pretence of an explanation. Perhaps, too,
in the intervals of the wild breezy music which accompanied the
exhibition, he might hear the low voice of the Veiled Lady, conveying
her sibylline responses. Firm as Theodore's nerves might be, and
much as he prided himself on his sturdy perception of realities, I
should not be surprised if his heart throbbed at a little more than
its ordinary rate.
Theodore concealed himself behind a screen. In due time the
performance was brought to a close, and whether the door was softly
opened, or whether her bodiless presence came through the wall, is
more than I can say, but, all at once, without the young man's
knowing how it happened, a veiled figure stood in the centre of the
room. It was one thing to be in presence of this mystery in the hall
of exhibition, where the warm, dense life of hundreds of other
mortals kept up the beholder's courage, and distributed her influence
among so many; it was another thing to be quite alone with her, and
that, too, with a hostile, or, at least, an unauthorized and
unjustifiable purpose. I further imagine that Theodore now began to
be sensible of something more serious in his enterprise than he had
been quite aware of while he sat with his boon-companions over their
sparkling wine.
Very strange, it must be confessed, was the movement with which the
figure floated to and fro over the carpet, with the silvery veil
covering her from head to foot; so impalpable, so ethereal, so
without substance, as the texture seemed, yet hiding her every
outline in an impenetrability like that of midnight. Surely, she did
not walk! She floated, and flitted, and hovered about the room; no
sound of a footstep, no perceptible motion of a limb; it was as if a
wandering breeze wafted her before it, at its own wild and gentle
pleasure. But, by and by, a purpose began to be discernible,
throughout the seeming vagueness of her unrest. She was in quest of
something. Could it be that a subtile presentiment had informed her
of the young man's presence? And if so, did the Veiled Lady seek or
did she shun him? The doubt in Theodore's mind was speedily resolved;
for, after a moment or two of these erratic flutterings, she
advanced more decidedly, and stood motionless before the screen.
"Thou art here!" said a soft, low voice. "Come forth, Theodore!"
Thus summoned by his name, Theodore, as a man of courage, had no
choice. He emerged from his concealment, and presented himself
before the Veiled Lady, with the wine-flush, it may be, quite gone
out of his cheeks.
"What wouldst thou with me?" she inquired, with the same gentle
composure that was in her former utterance.
"Mysterious creature," replied Theodore, "I would know who and what
you are!"
"My lips are forbidden to betray the secret," said the Veiled Lady.
"At whatever risk, I must discover it," rejoined Theodore.
"Then," said the Mystery, "there is no way save to lift my veil."
And Theodore, partly recovering his audacity, stept forward on the
instant, to do as the Veiled Lady had suggested. But she floated
backward to the opposite side of the room, as if the young man's
breath had possessed power enough to waft her away.
"Pause, one little instant," said the soft, low voice, "and learn the
conditions of what thou art so bold to undertake. Thou canst go
hence, and think of me no more; or, at thy option, thou canst lift
this mysterious veil, beneath which I am a sad and lonely prisoner,
in a bondage which is worse to me than death. But, before raising it,
I entreat thee, in all maiden modesty, to bend forward and impress a
kiss where my breath stirs the veil; and my virgin lips shall come
forward to meet thy lips; and from that instant, Theodore, thou shalt
be mine, and I thine, with never more a veil between us. And all the
felicity of earth and of the future world shall be thine and mine
together. So much may a maiden say behind the veil. If thou
shrinkest from this, there is yet another way." "And what is that?"
asked Theodore. "Dost thou hesitate," said the Veiled Lady, "to
pledge thyself to me, by meeting these lips of mine, while the veil
yet hides my face? Has not thy heart recognized me? Dost thou come
hither, not in holy faith, nor with a pure and generous purpose, but
in scornful scepticism and idle curiosity? Still, thou mayest lift
the veil! But, from that instant, Theodore, I am doomed to be thy
evil fate; nor wilt thou ever taste another breath of happiness!"
There was a shade of inexpressible sadness in the utterance of these
last words. But Theodore, whose natural tendency was towards
scepticism, felt himself almost injured and insulted by the Veiled
Lady's proposal that he should pledge himself, for life and eternity,
to so questionable a creature as herself; or even that she should
suggest an inconsequential kiss, taking into view the probability
that her face was none of the most bewitching. A delightful idea,
truly, that he should salute the lips of a dead girl, or the jaws of
a skeleton, or the grinning cavity of a monster's mouth! Even should
she prove a comely maiden enough in other respects, the odds were ten
to one that her teeth were defective; a terrible drawback on the
delectableness of a kiss.
"Excuse me, fair lady," said Theodore, and I think he nearly burst
into a laugh, "if I prefer to lift the veil first; and for this
affair of the kiss, we may decide upon it afterwards."
"Thou hast made thy choice," said the sweet, sad voice behind the
veil; and there seemed a tender but unresentful sense of wrong done
to womanhood by the young man's contemptuous interpretation of her
offer. "I must not counsel thee to pause, although thy fate is still
in thine own hand!"
Grasping at the veil, he flung it upward, and caught a glimpse of a
pale, lovely face beneath; just one momentary glimpse, and then the
apparition vanished, and the silvery veil fluttered slowly down and
lay upon the floor. Theodore was alone. Our legend leaves him there.
His retribution was, to pine forever and ever for another sight of
that dim, mournful face,--which might have been his life-long
household fireside joy,--to desire, and waste life in a feverish
quest, and never meet it more.
But what, in good sooth, had become of the Veiled Lady? Had all her
existence been comprehended within that mysterious veil, and was she
now annihilated? Or was she a spirit, with a heavenly essence, but
which might have been tamed down to human bliss, had Theodore been
brave and true enough to claim her? Hearken, my sweet friends,--and
hearken, dear Priscilla,--and you shall learn the little more that
Zenobia can tell you.
Just at the moment, so far as can be ascertained, when the Veiled
Lady vanished, a maiden, pale and shadowy, rose up amid a knot of
visionary people, who were seeking for the better life. She was so
gentle and so sad,--a nameless melancholy gave her such hold upon
their sympathies,--that they never thought of questioning whence she
came. She might have heretofore existed, or her thin substance might
have been moulded out of air at the very instant when they first
beheld her. It was all one to them; they took her to their hearts.
Among them was a lady to whom, more than to all the rest, this pale,
mysterious girl attached herself.
But one morning the lady was wandering in the woods, and there met
her a figure in an Oriental robe, with a dark beard, and holding in
his hand a silvery veil. He motioned her to stay. Being a woman of
some nerve, she did not shriek, nor run away, nor faint, as many
ladies would have been apt to do, but stood quietly, and bade him
speak. The truth was, she had seen his face before, but had never
feared it, although she knew him to be a terrible magician.
"Lady," said he, with a warning gesture, "you are in peril!" "Peril!"
she exclaimed. "And of what nature?"
"There is a certain maiden," replied the magician, "who has come out
of the realm of mystery, and made herself your most intimate
companion. Now, the fates have so ordained it, that, whether by her
own will or no, this stranger is your deadliest enemy. In love, in
worldly fortune, in all your pursuit of happiness, she is doomed to
fling a blight over your prospects. There is but one possibility of
thwarting her disastrous influence."
"Then tell me that one method," said the lady.
"Take this veil," he answered, holding forth the silvery texture.
"It is a spell; it is a powerful enchantment, which I wrought for her
sake, and beneath which she was once my prisoner. Throw it, at
unawares, over the head of this secret foe, stamp your foot, and cry,
'Arise, Magician! Here is the Veiled Lady!' and immediately I will
rise up through the earth, and seize her; and from that moment you
are safe!"
So the lady took the silvery veil, which was like woven air, or like
some substance airier than nothing, and that would float upward and
be lost among the clouds, were she once to let it go. Returning
homeward, she found the shadowy girl amid the knot of visionary
transcendentalists, who were still seeking for the better life. She
was joyous now, and had a rose-bloom in her cheeks, and was one of
the prettiest creatures, and seemed one of the happiest, that the
world could show. But the lady stole noiselessly behind her and
threw the veil over her head. As the slight, ethereal texture sank
inevitably down over her figure, the poor girl strove to raise it,
and met her dear friend's eyes with one glance of mortal terror, and
deep, deep reproach. It could not change her purpose.
"Arise, Magician!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot upon the earth.
"Here is the Veiled Lady!"
At the word, up rose the bearded man in the Oriental robes,--the
beautiful, the dark magician, who had bartered away his soul! He
threw his arms around the Veiled Lady, and she was his bond-slave for
evermore!
Zenobia, all this while, had been holding the piece of gauze, and so
managed it as greatly to increase the dramatic effect of the legend
at those points where the magic veil was to be described. Arriving
at the catastrophe, and uttering the fatal words, she flung the gauze
over Priscilla's head; and for an instant her auditors held their
breath, half expecting, I verily believe, that the magician would
start up through the floor, and carry off our poor little friend
before our eyes.
As for Priscilla, she stood droopingly in the midst of us, making no
attempt to remove the veil.
"How do you find yourself, my love?" said Zenobia, lifting a corner
of the gauze, and peeping beneath it with a mischievous smile. "Ah,
the dear little soul! Why, she is really going to faint! Mr.
Coverdale, Mr. Coverdale, pray bring a glass of water!"
Her nerves being none of the strongest, Priscilla hardly recovered
her equanimity during the rest of the evening. This, to be sure, was
a great pity; but, nevertheless, we thought it a very bright idea of
Zenobia's to bring her legend to so effective a conclusion.
XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT
Our Sundays at Blithedale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid
observance as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims,
whose high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered ourselves, we had
taken up, and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which
they never dreamed of attaining.
On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our labors. Our
oxen, relieved from their week-day yoke, roamed at large through the
pasture; each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate,
and continuing to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish
sympathy, the union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard
ends. As for us human yoke-fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose
hoes had clinked together throughout the week, we wandered off, in
various directions, to enjoy our interval of repose. Some, I believe,
went devoutly to the village church. Others, it may be, ascended a
city or a country pulpit, wearing the clerical robe with so much
dignity that you would scarcely have suspected the yeoman's frock to
have been flung off only since milking-time. Others took long
rambles among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to look at black
old farmhouses, with their sloping roofs; and at the modern cottage,
so like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow could
have no scope within; and at the more pretending villa, with its
range of wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great
portico. Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay
there for hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and
the shadows strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to
make it cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows
twittered a cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they
darted to and fro among the golden rules of sunshine. And others
went a little way into the woods, and threw themselves on mother
earth, pillowing their heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an
old log; and, dropping asleep, the bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and
buzzed about their ears, causing the slumberers to twitch and start,
without awaking.
With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a
custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock. It was
known to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that
the venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by,
to an Indian auditory. The old pine forest, through which the
Apostle's voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago.
But the soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had
apparently never been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and
beech and birch, had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was
still as wild a tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great
grandson of one of Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in
existence) could have desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam.
These after-growths, indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the
original forest. If left in due neglect, however, they run into an
entanglement of softer wildness, among the rustling leaves of which
the sun can scatter cheerfulness as it never could among the
dark-browed pines.
The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite
bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many
fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if
the scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots
than any other earth. At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders
inclined towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within
which our little party had sometimes found protection from a summer
shower. On the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft of pale
columbines, in their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses,
such as Priscilla was when we first knew her; children of the sun,
who had never seen their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though
not akin to them. At the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the
canopy of a birch-tree, which served as a sounding-board for the
pulpit. Beneath this shade (with my eyes of sense half shut and
those of the imagination widely opened) I used to see the holy
Apostle of the Indians, with the sunlight flickering down upon him
through the leaves, and glorifying his figure as with the
half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.
I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath
solitude, because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended
Eliot's pulpit, and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few
disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's
breath among the leaves of the birch-tree. No other speech of man
has ever moved me like some of those discourses. It seemed most
pitiful--a positive calamity to the world--that a treasury of golden
thoughts should thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down among
us three, when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them;
and Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sympathy of
multitudes. After speaking much or little, as might happen, he would
descend from his gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full
length on the ground, face downward. Meanwhile, we talked around him
on such topics as were suggested by the discourse.
Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities
of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear. On the
first Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered
down from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and
passion, nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did
to women, and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and
honor, and with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in
public.
"It shall not always be so!" cried she. "If I live another year, I
will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"
She perhaps saw me smile.
"What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?"
exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes. "That smile,
permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and
shallow thought. It is my belief--yes, and my prophecy, should I die
before it happens--that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there
will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man. Thus
far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart
and her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of
society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats! We
mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid.
You let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects.
But the pen is not for woman. Her power is too natural and
immediate. It is with the living voice alone that she can compel the
world to recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her
heart!"
Now,--though I could not well say so to Zenobia,--I had not smiled
from any unworthy estimate of woman, or in denial of the claims which
she is beginning to put forth. What amused and puzzled me was the
fact, that women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet
themselves about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own
individual affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease.
They are not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of
exceptional misfortune. I could measure Zenobia's inward trouble by
the animosity with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman
against man.
"I will give you leave, Zenobia," replied I, "to fling your utmost
scorn upon me, if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to
the widest liberty which woman has yet dreamed of. I would give her
all she asks, and add a great deal more, which she will not be the
party to demand, but which men, if they were generous and wise, would
grant of their own free motion. For instance, I should love
dearly--for the next thousand years, at least--to have all government
devolve into the hands of women. I hate to be ruled by my own sex;
it excites my jealousy, and wounds my pride. It is the iron sway of
bodily force which abases us, in our compelled submission. But how
sweet the free, generous courtesy with which I would kneel before a
woman-ruler!"
"Yes, if she were young and beautiful," said Zenobia, laughing. "But
how if she were sixty, and a fright?"
"Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low," said I. "But let me go on.
I have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my
heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good. I blush at the
very thought! Oh, in the better order of things, Heaven grant that
the ministry of souls may be left in charge of women! The gates of
the Blessed City will be thronged with the multitude that enter in,
when that day comes! The task belongs to woman. God meant it for
her. He has endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost
depth and purity, refined from that gross, intellectual alloy with
which every masculine theologist--save only One, who merely veiled
himself in mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine--has
been prone to mingle it. I have always envied the Catholics their
faith in that sweet, sacred Virgin Mother, who stands between them
and the Deity, intercepting somewhat of his awful splendor, but
permitting his love to stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly
to human comprehension through the medium of a woman's tenderness.
Have I not said enough, Zenobia?"
"I cannot think that this is true," observed Priscilla, who had been
gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes. "And I am sure I do not
wish it to be true!"
"Poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously. "She is the
type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it. He
is never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards
what he loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even more
blindness to his own interests than profligate disregard of ours!"
"Is this true?" asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to
Hollingsworth. "Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have
been saying?"
"No, Priscilla!" answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.
"They have neither of them spoken one true word yet."
"Do you despise woman?" said Zenobia.
"Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"
"Despise her? No!" cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy
head and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely.
"She is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and
character. Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of the
sympathizer; the unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition,
withheld in every other manner, but given, in pity, through woman's
heart, lest man should utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of
God's own voice, pronouncing, 'It is well done!' All the separate
action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false,
foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities,
void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs!
Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster--and, thank
Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without
man as her acknowledged principal! As true as I had once a mother
whom I loved, were there any possible prospect of woman's taking the
social stand which some of them,--poor, miserable, abortive creatures,
who only dream of such things because they have missed woman's
peculiar happiness, or because nature made them really neither man
nor woman!--if there were a chance of their attaining the end which
these petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my
own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of
sovereignty, to scourge them back within their proper bounds! But it
will not be needful. The heart of time womanhood knows where its own
sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!"
Never was mortal blessed--if blessing it were--with a glance of such
entire acquiescence and unquestioning faith, happy in its
completeness, as our little Priscilla unconsciously bestowed on
Hollingsworth. She seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into
her heart, and brood over it in perfect content. The very woman whom
he pictured--the gentle parasite, the soft reflection of a more
powerful existence--sat there at his feet.
I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent--as I
felt, by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought
this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of
masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived
woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to
make it a mere incident in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth had
boldly uttered what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt.
Without intending it, he had disclosed the wellspring of all these
troubled waters. Now, if ever, it surely behooved Zenobia to be the
champion of her sex.
But, to my surprise, and indignation too, she only looked humbled.
Some tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not
anger.
"Well, be it so," was all she said. "I, at least, have deep cause to
think you right. Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only
too ready to become to him what you say!"
I smiled--somewhat bitterly, it is true--in contemplation of my own
ill-luck. How little did these two women care for me, who had freely
conceded all their claims, and a great deal more, out of the fulness
of my heart; while Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his horrible
injustice, seemed to have brought them both to his feet!
"Women almost invariably behave thus," thought I. "What does the fact
mean? Is it their nature? Or is it, at last, the result of ages of
compelled degradation? And, in either case, will it be possible ever
to redeem them?"
An intuition now appeared to possess all the party, that, for this
time, at least, there was no more to be said. With one accord, we
arose from the ground, and made our way through the tangled
undergrowth towards one of those pleasant wood-paths that wound among
the overarching trees. Some of the branches hung so low as partly to
conceal the figures that went before from those who followed.
Priscilla had leaped up more lightly than the rest of us, and ran
along in advance, with as much airy activity of spirit as was
typified in the motion of a bird, which chanced to be flitting from
tree to tree, in the same direction as herself. Never did she seem
so happy as that afternoon. She skipt, and could not help it, from
very playfulness of heart.
Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next, in close contiguity, but not
with arm in arm. Now, just when they had passed the impending bough
of a birch-tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth
in both her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall again!
The gesture was sudden, and full of passion; the impulse had
evidently taken her by surprise; it expressed all! Had Zenobia knelt
before him, or flung herself upon his breast, and gasped out, "I love
you, Hollingsworth!" I could not have been more certain of what it
meant. They then walked onward, as before. But, methought, as the
declining sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I
beheld it tremulous; and the delicate stem of the flower which she
wore in her hair was likewise responsive to her agitation.
Priscilla--through the medium of her eyes, at least could not
possibly have been aware of the gesture above described. Yet, at
that instant, I saw her droop. The buoyancy, which just before had
been so bird-like, was utterly departed; the life seemed to pass out
of her, and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and gray.
I almost imagined her a shadow, tiding gradually into the dimness of
the wood. Her pace became so slow that Hollingsworth and Zenobia
passed by, and I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook her.
"Come, Priscilla," said I, looking her intently in the face, which
was very pale and sorrowful, "we must make haste after our friends.
Do you feel suddenly ill? A moment ago, you flitted along so lightly
that I was comparing you to a bird. Now, on the contrary, it is as
if you had a heavy heart, and a very little strength to bear it with.
Pray take my arm!"
"No," said Priscilla, "I do not think it would help me. It is my
heart, as you say, that makes me heavy; and I know not why. Just now,
I felt very happy."
No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt to come within
her maidenly mystery; but, as she appeared to be tossed aside by her
other friends, or carelessly let fall, like a flower which they had
done with, I could not resist the impulse to take just one peep
beneath her folded petals.
"Zenobia and yourself are dear friends of late," I remarked. "At
first,--that first evening when you came to us,--she did not receive
you quite so warmly as might have been wished."
"I remember it," said Priscilla. "No wonder she hesitated to love me,
who was then a stranger to her, and a girl of no grace or beauty,--
she being herself so beautiful!"
"But she loves you now, of course?" suggested I. "And at this very
instant you feel her to be your dearest friend?"
"Why do you ask me that question?" exclaimed Priscilla, as if
frightened at the scrutiny into her feelings which I compelled her to
make. "It somehow puts strange thoughts into my mind. But I do love
Zenobia dearly! If she only loves me half as well, I shall be happy!"
"How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?" I rejoined. "But
observe how pleasantly and happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are
walking together. I call it a delightful spectacle. It truly
rejoices me that Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a
friend! So many people in the world mistrust him,--so many
disbelieve and ridicule, while hardly any do him justice, or
acknowledge him for the wonderful man he is,--that it is really a
blessed thing for him to have won the sympathy of such a woman as
Zenobia. Any man might be proud of that. Any man, even if he be as
great as Hollingsworth, might love so magnificent a woman. How very
beautiful Zenobia is! And Hollingsworth knows it, too."
There may have been some petty malice in what I said. Generosity is
a very fine thing, at a proper time and within due limits. But it is
an insufferable bore to see one man engrossing every thought of all
the women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion,
without even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more
fortunate individual has rejected. Yes, it was out of a foolish
bitterness of heart that I had spoken.
"Go on before," said Priscilla abruptly, and with true feminine
imperiousness, which heretofore I had never seen her exercise. "It
pleases me best to loiter along by myself. I do not walk so fast as
you."
With her hand she made a little gesture of dismissal. It provoked me;
yet, on the whole, was the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had
ever done. I obeyed her, and strolled moodily homeward,
wondering--as I had wondered a thousand times already--how
Hollingsworth meant to dispose of these two hearts, which (plainly to
my perception, and, as I could not but now suppose, to his) he had
engrossed into his own huge egotism.
There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful of
speculation. In what attitude did Zenobia present herself to
Hollingsworth? Was it in that of a free woman, with no mortgage on
her affections nor claimant to her hand, but fully at liberty to
surrender both, in exchange for the heart and hand which she
apparently expected to receive? But was it a vision that I had
witnessed in the wood? Was Westervelt a goblin? Were those words of
passion and agony, which Zenobia had uttered in my hearing, a mere
stage declamation? Were they formed of a material lighter than
common air? Or, supposing them to bear sterling weight, was it a
perilous and dreadful wrong which she was meditating towards herself
and Hollingsworth?
Arriving nearly at the farmhouse, I looked back over the long slope
of pasture land, and beheld them standing together, in the light of
sunset, just on the spot where, according to the gossip of the
Community, they meant to build their cottage. Priscilla, alone and
forgotten, was lingering in the shadow of the wood.
XV. A CRISIS
Thus the summer was passing away,--a summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart,
and there became a rich experience. I found myself looking forward
to years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system. The
Community were now beginning to form their permanent plans. One of
our purposes was to erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it,
after Fourier; but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in
my remembrance), where the great and general family should have its
abiding-place. Individual members, too, who made it a point of
religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were
selecting sites for their cottages, by the wood-side, or on the
breezy swells, or in the sheltered nook of some little valley,
according as their taste might lean towards snugness or the
picturesque. Altogether, by projecting our minds outward, we had
imparted a show of novelty to existence, and contemplated it as
hopefully as if the soil beneath our feet had not been fathom-deep
with the dust of deluded generations, on every one of which, as on
ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a hitherto unwedded bride.
Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects. It was
easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervor,
but either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or, at
any rate, with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern
of his. Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he and I
were repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying
forward into the future time.
"When we come to be old men," I said, "they will call us uncles, or
fathers,--Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale,--and we will look
back cheerfully to these early days, and make a romantic story for
the young People (and if a little more romantic than truth may
warrant, it will be no harm) out of our severe trials and hardships.
In a century or two, we shall, every one of us, be mythical
personages, or exceedingly picturesque and poetical ones, at all
events. They will have a great public hall, in which your portrait,
and mine, and twenty other faces that are living now, shall be hung
up; and as for me, I will be painted in my shirtsleeves, and with the
sleeves rolled up, to show my muscular development. What stories
will be rife among them about our mighty strength!" continued I,
lifting a big stone and putting it into its place, "though our
posterity will really be far stronger than ourselves, after several
generations of a simple, natural, and active life. What legends of
Zenobia's beauty, and Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and
those mysterious qualities which make her seem diaphanous with
spiritual light! In due course of ages, we must all figure
heroically in an epic poem; and we will ourselves--at least, I
will--bend unseen over the future poet, and lend him inspiration
while he writes it."
"You seem," said Hollingsworth, "to be trying how much nonsense you
can pour out in a breath."
"I wish you would see fit to comprehend," retorted I, "that the
profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine tenths of nonsense, else
it is not worth the breath that utters it. But I do long for the
cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over
them, and the moss to gather on the walls, and the trees--which we
will set out--to cover them with a breadth of shadow. This
spick-and-span novelty does not quite suit my taste. It is time, too,
for children to be born among us. The first-born child is still to
come. And I shall never feel as if this were a real, practical, as
well as poetical system of human life, until somebody has sanctified
it by death."
"A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!" said Hollingsworth.
"As good as any other," I replied. "I wonder, Hollingsworth, who, of
all these strong men, and fair women and maidens, is doomed the first
to die. Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of
it, to fix upon a spot for a cemetery? Let us choose the rudest,
roughest, most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and
Death shall teach us to beautify it, grave by grave. By our sweet,
calm way of dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape
our funeral rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model
into tombstones, the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that
hereafter it may be happiness to live, and bliss to die. None of us
must die young. Yet, should Providence ordain it so, the event shall
not be sorrowful, but affect us with a tender, delicious, only
half-melancholy, and almost smiling pathos!"
"That is to say," muttered Hollingsworth, "you will die like a
heathen, as you certainly live like one. But, listen to me,
Coverdale. Your fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more
forcibly what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we
have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine
that any such realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of,
will ever be brought to pass?"
"Certainly I do," said I. "Of course, when the reality comes, it will
wear the every-day, commonplace, dusty, and rather homely garb that
reality always does put on. But, setting aside the ideal charm, I
hold that our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common
sense."
"You only half believe what you say," rejoined Hollingsworth; "and as
for me, I neither have faith in your dream, nor would care the value
of this pebble for its realization, were that possible. And what
more do you want of it? It has given you a theme for poetry. Let
that content you. But now I ask you to be, at last, a man of
sobriety and earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise which is worth
all our strength, and the strength of a thousand mightier than we."
There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation that ensued.
It is enough to say that Hollingsworth once more brought forward
his rigid and unconquerable idea,--a scheme for the reformation of
the wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the
sympathy of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to
his pupils the possibility of a worthier life than that which had
become their fate. It appeared, unless he overestimated his own
means, that Hollingsworth held it at his choice (and he did so
choose) to obtain possession of the very ground on which we had
planted our Community, and which had not yet been made irrevocably
ours, by purchase. It was just the foundation that he desired. Our
beginnings might readily be adapted to his great end. The
arrangements already completed would work quietly into his system.
So plausible looked his theory, and, more than that, so practical,--
such an air of reasonableness had he, by patient thought, thrown
over it,--each segment of it was contrived to dovetail into all the
rest with such a complicated applicability, and so ready was he with
a response for every objection, that, really, so far as logic and
argument went, he had the matter all his own way.
"But," said I, "whence can you, having no means of your own, derive
the enormous capital which is essential to this experiment? State
Street, I imagine, would not draw its purser strings very liberally
in aid of such a speculation."
"I have the funds--as much, at least, as is needed for a
commencement--at command," he answered. "They can be produced within
a month, if necessary."
My thoughts reverted to Zenobia. It could only be her wealth which
Hollingsworth was appropriating so lavishly. And on what conditions
was it to be had? Did she fling it into the scheme with the
uncalculating generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her
impulse to be generous at all? And did she fling herself along with
it? But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an explanation.
"And have you no regrets," I inquired, "in overthrowing this fair
system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now
beginning to flourish so hopefully around us? How beautiful it is,
and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable! The ages have waited
for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on
our mortal existence in love and mutual help! Hollingsworth, I would
be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience."
"Then let it rest wholly upon mine!" he answered, knitting his black
brows. "I see through the system. It is full of defects,--
irremediable and damning ones!--from first to last, there is
nothing else! I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever.
There is not human nature in it."
"Why are you so secret in your operations?" I asked. "God forbid
that I should accuse you of intentional wrong; but the besetting sin
of a philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity.
His sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men.
At some point of his course--I know not exactly when or where--he is
tempted to palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading
himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable
to throw aside his private conscience. Oh, my dear friend, beware
this error! If you meditate the overthrow of this establishment,
call together our companions, state your design, support it with all
your eloquence, but allow them an opportunity of defending themselves."
"It does not suit me," said Hollingsworth. "Nor is it my duty to do
so."
"I think it is," replied I.
Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate, inexorably.
"I will not argue the point," said he. "What I desire to know of you
is,--and you can tell me in one word,--whether I am to look for your
cooperation in this great scheme of good? Take it up with me! Be my
brother in it! It offers you (what you have told me, over and over
again, that you most need) a purpose in life, worthy of the extremest
self-devotion,--worthy of martyrdom, should God so order it! In this
view, I present it to you. You can greatly benefit mankind. Your
peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable of being so
wrought into this enterprise that not one of them need lie idle.
Strike hands with me, and from this moment you shall never again feel
the languor and vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied
man. There may be no more aimless beauty in your life; but, in its
stead, there shall be strength, courage, immitigable will,--
everything that a manly and generous nature should desire! We
shall succeed! We shall have done our best for this miserable world;
and happiness (which never comes but incidentally) will come to us
unawares."
It seemed his intention to say no more. But, after he had quite
broken off, his deep eyes filled with tears, and he held out both his
hands to me.
"Coverdale," he murmured, "there is not the man in this wide world
whom I can love as I could you. Do not forsake me!"
As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness and dimness of
so many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had
caught hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an
almost irresistible force. It is a mystery to me how I withstood it.
But, in truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what
was odious. A loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work!
A great black ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a
thousand human hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an
experiment of
transmuting it into virtue! Had I but touched his extended hand,
Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his
own conception of all these matters. But I stood aloof. I fortified
myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too
gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on
considerations that should have been paramount to every other.
"Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise?" I asked.
"She is," said Hollingsworth.
"She!--the beautiful!--the gorgeous!" I exclaimed. "And how have
you prevailed with such a woman to work in this squalid element?"
"Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect," he answered; "but
by addressing whatever is best and noblest in her."
Hollingsworth was looking on the ground. But, as he often did so,--
generally, indeed, in his habitual moods of thought,--I could not
judge whether it was from any special unwillingness now to meet my
eyes. What it was that dictated my next question, I cannot precisely
say. Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into my mouth, and, as it
were, asked itself so involuntarily, that there must needs have been
an aptness in it.
"What is to become of Priscilla?"
Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely, and with glowing eyes. He could
not have shown any other kind of expression than that, had he meant
to strike me with a sword.
"Why do you bring in the names of these women?" said he, after a
moment of pregnant silence. "What have they to do with the proposal
which I make you? I must have your answer! Will you devote yourself,
and sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of friends
forever?"
"In Heaven's name, Hollingsworth," cried I, getting angry, and glad
to be angry, because so only was it possible to oppose his tremendous
concentrativeness and indomitable will, "cannot you conceive that a
man may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some
other plan than precisely that which you have laid down? And will
you cast off a friend for no unworthiness, but merely because he
stands upon his right as an individual being, and looks at matters
through his own optics, instead of yours?"
"Be with me," said Hollingsworth, "or be against me! There is no
third choice for you."
"Take this, then, as my decision," I answered. "I doubt the wisdom
of your scheme. Furthermore, I greatly fear that the methods by
which you allow yourself to pursue it are such as cannot stand the
scrutiny of an unbiassed conscience."
"And you will not join me?"
"No!"
I never said the word--and certainly can never have it to say
hereafter--that cost me a thousandth part so hard an effort as did
that one syllable. The heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an
absolute torture of the breast. I was gazing steadfastly at
Hollingsworth. It seemed to me that it struck him, too, like a
bullet. A ghastly paleness--always so terrific on a swarthy
face--overspread his features. There was a convulsive movement of
his throat, as if he were forcing down some words that struggled and
fought for utterance. Whether words of anger, or words of grief, I
cannot tell; although many and many a time I have vainly tormented
myself with conjecturing which of the two they were. One other
appeal to my friendship,--such as once, already, Hollingsworth had
made,--taking me in the revulsion that followed a strenuous exercise
of opposing will, would completely have subdued me. But he left the
matter there. "Well!" said he.
And that was all! I should have been thankful for one word more,
even had it shot me through the heart, as mine did him. But he did
not speak it; and, after a few moments, with one accord, we set to
work again, repairing the stone fence. Hollingsworth, I observed,
wrought like a Titan; and, for my own part, I lifted stones which at
this day--or, in a calmer mood, at that one--I should no more have
thought it possible to stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my
back.
XVI. LEAVE-TAKINGS
A few days after the tragic passage-at-arms between Hollingsworth and
me, I appeared at the dinner-table actually dressed in a coat,
instead of my customary blouse; with a satin cravat, too, a white
vest, and several other things that made me seem strange and
outlandish to myself. As for my companions, this unwonted spectacle
caused a great stir upon the wooden benches that bordered either side
of our homely board.
"What's in the wind now, Miles?" asked one of them. "Are you
deserting us?"
"Yes, for a week or two," said I. "It strikes me that my health
demands a little relaxation of labor, and a short visit to the
seaside, during the dog-days."
"You look like it!" grumbled Silas Foster, not greatly pleased with
the idea of losing an efficient laborer before the stress of the
season was well over. "Now, here's a pretty fellow! His shoulders
have broadened a matter of six inches since he came among us; he can
do his day's work, if he likes, with any man or ox on the farm; and
yet he talks about going to the seashore for his health! Well, well,
old woman," added he to his wife, "let me have a plateful of that
pork and cabbage! I begin to feel in a very weakly way. When the
others have had their turn, you and I will take a jaunt to Newport or
Saratoga!"
"Well, but, Mr. Foster," said I, "you must allow me to take a little
breath."
"Breath!" retorted the old yeoman. "Your lungs have the play of a
pair of blacksmith's bellows already. What on earth do you want
more? But go along! I understand the business. We shall never see
your face here again. Here ends the reformation of the world, so far
as Miles Coverdale has a hand in it!"
"By no means," I replied. "I am resolute to die in the last ditch,
for the good of the cause."
"Die in a ditch!" muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee
intolerance of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth
of July, the autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,--
"die in a ditch! I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there
were no steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it!"
The truth was, that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had
come over me. Blithedale was no longer what it had been. Everything
was suddenly faded. The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and
pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the
lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had
blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and
shadiest of my contemplative
recesses. The change will be recognized by many, who, after a period
of happiness, have endeavored to go on with the same kind of life, in
the same scene, in spite of the alteration or withdrawal of some
principal circumstance. They discover (what heretofore, perhaps,
they had not known) that it was this which gave the bright color and
vivid reality to the whole affair.
I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but
with Zenobia and Priscilla. As regarded the two latter, it was that
dreamlike and miserable sort of change that denies you the privilege
to complain, because you can assert no positive injury, nor lay your
finger on anything tangible. It is a matter which you do not see,
but feel, and which, when you try to analyze it, seems to lose its
very existence, and resolve itself into a sickly humor of your own.
Your understanding, possibly, may put faith in this denial. But your
heart will not so easily rest satisfied. It incessantly remonstrates,
though, most of the time, in a bass-note, which you do not
separately distinguish; but, now and then, with a sharp cry,
importunate to be heard, and resolute to claim belief. "Things are
not as they were!" it keeps saying. "You shall not impose on me! I
will never be quiet! I will throb painfully! I will be heavy, and
desolate, and shiver with cold! For I, your deep heart, know when to
be miserable, as once I knew when to be happy! All is changed for us!
You are beloved no more!" And were my life to be spent over again,
I would invariably lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths,
however clamorous the music and the merriment of a more superficial
region.
My outbreak with Hollingsworth, though never definitely known to our
associates, had really an effect upon the moral atmosphere of the
Community. It was incidental to the closeness of relationship into
which we had brought ourselves, that an unfriendly state of feeling
could not occur between any two members without the whole society
being more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby. This
species of nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough,
sentimentally considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of
love among us) was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical
operation, mortal tempers being so infirm and variable as they are.
If one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the
tingle was immediately felt on the same side of everybody's head.
Thus, even on the supposition that we were far less quarrelsome than
the rest of the world, a great deal of time was necessarily wasted in
rubbing our ears.
Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at
least a temporary novelty. I thought of going across the Rocky
Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile; of offering myself a
volunteer on the Exploring Expedition; of taking a ramble of years,
no matter in what direction, and coming back on the other side of the
world. Then, should the colonists of Blithedale have established
their enterprise on a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim
staff and dusty shoon, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere. Or,
in case Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his School of
Reform, as he now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough, by
that time, to give me what I was inclined to think the only
trustworthy hold on his affections. Meanwhile, before deciding on
any ultimate plan, I determined to remove myself to a little distance,
and take an exterior view of what we had all been about.
In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as
was going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that
were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a
noble and happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and,
having a decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel
it) getting quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing
state of the world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind
of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or
ought to be. It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe
the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or
fast becoming so; that the crust of the earth in many places was
broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a
day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex.
Our great globe floated in the atmosphere of infinite space like an
unsubstantial bubble. No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity,
if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people,
without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to
correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.
It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with
the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the
merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had
not come into vogue since yesterday morning.
The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the
sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but
forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the
penance is fully equal to the pleasure. So I kissed none of them;
and nobody, to say the truth, seemed to expect it.
"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the
watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the
rights of women?"
"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;
"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have
the force to exercise them."
She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,
with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled
light of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate
flame, flickering and fitful.
"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all
the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and
can never be lived over again. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I
have been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for
lack of a better and wiser one? But you are too young to be my
father confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like
one of those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a
tragedy-queen."
"I would, at least, be loyal and faithful," answered I; "and would
counsel you with an honest purpose, if not wisely."
"Yes," said Zenobia, "you would be only too wise, too honest.
Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's
expense!"
"Ah, Zenobia," I exclaimed, "if you would but let me speak!"
"By no means," she replied, "especially when you have just resumed
the whole series of social conventionalisms, together with that
strait-bodied coat. I would as lief open my heart to a lawyer or a
clergyman! No, no, Mr. Coverdale; if I choose a counsellor, in the
present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman;
and I rather apprehend that the latter would be likeliest of the two
to speak the fitting word. It needs a wild steersman when we voyage
through chaos! The anchor is up,--farewell!"
Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had betaken herself into a
corner, and set to work on a little purse. As I approached her, she
let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look; for, with all her
delicacy of nerves, there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla,
and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary
commotion, like the water in a deep well.
"Will you give me that purse, Priscilla," said I, "as a parting
keepsake?"
"Yes," she answered, "if you will wait till it is finished."
"I must not wait, even for that," I replied. "Shall I find you here,
on my return?"
"I never wish to go away," said she.
"I have sometimes thought," observed I, smiling, "that you, Priscilla,
are a little prophetess, or, at least, that you have spiritual
intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people.
If that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen;
for I am tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return
even so soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed.
Have you any impressions of this nature?"
"Ah, no," said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively. "If any such
misfortune is coming, the shadow has not reached me yet. Heaven
forbid! I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one
summer follow another, and all just like this."
"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike," said
I, with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself. "Times
change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily,
so much the worse for us. Good-by, Priscilla!"
I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor
returned. Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass; it had
room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned
me.
On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth. I had a momentary impulse to
hold out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted
both. When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not
well to mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace
civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead
henceforth to him, and he to me, there could be no propriety in our
chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or
playing at looks of courtesy with eyes that were impenetrable beneath
the glaze and the film. We passed, therefore, as if mutually
invisible.
I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was,
that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty,
and take leave of the swine! There they lay, buried as deeply among
the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very
symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort. They were asleep,
drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and
down. Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked
dimly forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle
grunt; not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath
for that particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary
inhalation. They were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive,
in their own corporeal substance. The very unreadiness and
oppression wherewith these greasy citizens gained breath enough to
keep their life-machinery in sluggish movement appeared to make them
only the more sensible of the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their
existence. Peeping at me an instant out of their small, red, hardly
perceptible eyes, they dropt asleep again; yet not so far asleep but
that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream
and reality.
"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas
Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze. "I shall have these fat
fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell
you!"
"O cruel Silas, what a horrible idea!" cried I. "All the rest of us,
men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are
bedevilled with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you
mean to cut their throats and eat them! It would be more for the
general comfort to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we
should be!"
XVII. THE HOTEL
Arriving in town (where my bachelor-rooms, long before this time, had
received some other occupant), I established myself, for a day or two,
in a certain, respectable hotel. It was situated somewhat aloof
from my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid
most of my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other
interests, and who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves
at the expense of the amateur workingman. The hotel-keeper put me
into a back room of the third story of his spacious establishment.
The day was lowering, with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly
tempered east wind, which seemed to come right off the chill and
melancholy sea, hardly mitigated by sweeping over the roofs, and
amalgamating itself with the dusky element of city smoke. All the
effeminacy of past days had returned upon me at once. Summer as it
still was, I ordered a coal fire in the rusty grate, and was glad to
find myself growing a little too warm with an artificial temperature.
My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote
regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.
There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into
one impression. It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of
mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life. True, if you look
at it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country. But,
considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a
different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its
aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into
the current history which time was writing off. At one moment, the
very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy
room in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next
instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in
time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised
whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of
a speculative man. I had never before experienced a mood that so
robbed the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a
charm, on which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to
pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.
Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the
thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many
men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took
quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could
never be enough of it. Each characteristic sound was too suggestive
to be passed over unnoticed. Beneath and around me, I heard the stir
of the hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper;
steps echoing on the staircase; the ringing of a bell, announcing
arrivals or departures; the porter lumbering past my door with
baggage, which he thumped down upon the floors of neighboring
chambers; the lighter feet of chambermaids scudding along the
passages;--it is ridiculous to think what an interest they had for me!
From the street came the tumult of the pavements, pervading the
whole house with a continual uproar, so broad and deep that only an
unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it. A company of the city soldiery,
with a full military band, marched in front of the hotel, invisible
to me, but stirringly audible both by its foot-tramp and the clangor
of its instruments. Once or twice all the city bells jangled
together, announcing a fire, which brought out the engine-men and
their machines, like an army with its artillery rushing to battle.
Hour by hour the clocks in many steeples responded one to another.
In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an
exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day
occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the
rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion.
Then ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and
thump of sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels. All this
was just as valuable, in its way, as the sighing of the breeze among
the birch-trees that overshadowed Eliot's pulpit.
Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human
activity and pastime. It suited me better, for the present, to
linger on the brink, or hover in the air above it. So I spent the
first day, and the greater part of the second, in the laziest manner
possible, in a rocking-chair, inhaling the fragrance of a series of
cigars, with my legs and slippered feet horizontally disposed, and in
my hand a novel purchased of a railroad bibliopolist. The gradual
waste of my cigar accomplished itself with an easy and gentle
expenditure of breath. My book was of the dullest, yet had a sort of
sluggish flow, like that of a stream in which your boat is as often
aground as afloat. Had there been a more impetuous rush, a more
absorbing passion of the narrative, I should the sooner have
struggled out of its uneasy current, and have given myself up to the
swell and subsidence of my thoughts. But, as it was, the torpid life
of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment to the life within
me and about me. At intervals, however, when its effect grew a
little too soporific,--not for my patience, but for the possibility
of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from the
rocking-chair, and looked out of the window.
A gray sky; the weathercock of a steeple that rose beyond the
opposite range of buildings, pointing from the eastward; a sprinkle
of small, spiteful-looking raindrops on the window-pane. In that
ebb-tide of my energies, had I thought of venturing abroad, these
tokens would have checked the abortive purpose.
After several such visits to the window, I found myself getting
pretty well acquainted with that little portion of the backside of
the universe which it presented to my view. Over against the hotel
and its adjacent houses, at the distance of forty or fifty yards, was
the rear of a range of buildings which appeared to be spacious,
modern, and calculated for fashionable residences. The interval
between was apportioned into grass-plots, and here and there an
apology for a garden, pertaining severally to these dwellings. There
were apple-trees, and pear and peach trees, too, the fruit on which
looked singularly large, luxuriant, and abundant, as well it might,
in a situation so warm and sheltered, and where the soil had
doubtless been enriched to a more than natural fertility. In two or
three places grapevines clambered upon trellises, and bore clusters
already purple, and promising the richness of Malta or Madeira in
their ripened juice. The blighting winds of our rigid climate could
not molest these trees and vines; the sunshine, though descending
late into this area, and too early intercepted by the height of the
surrounding houses, yet lay tropically there, even when less than
temperate in every other region. Dreary as was the day, the scene
was illuminated by not a few sparrows and other birds, which spread
their wings, and flitted and fluttered, and alighted now here, now
there, and busily scratched their food out of the wormy earth. Most
of these winged people seemed to have their domicile in a robust and
healthy buttonwood-tree. It aspired upward, high above the roofs of
the houses, and spread a dense head of foliage half across the area.
There was a cat--as there invariably is in such places--who evidently
thought herself entitled to the privileges of forest life in this
close heart of city conventionalisms. I watched her creeping along
the low, flat roofs of the offices, descending a flight of wooden
steps, gliding among the grass, and besieging the buttonwood-tree,
with murderous purpose against its feathered citizens. But, after
all, they were birds of city breeding, and doubtless knew how to
guard themselves against the peculiar perils of their position.
Bewitching to my fancy are all those nooks and crannies where Nature,
like a stray partridge, hides her head among the long-established
haunts of men! It is likewise to be remarked, as a general rule,
that there is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and
characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness in the
back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its
front. The latter is always artificial; it is meant for the world's
eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment. Realities keep in
the rear, and put forward an advance guard of show and humbug. The
posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has
unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the
immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life
and individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him
past the premises. In a city, the distinction between what is
offered to the public and what is kept for the family is certainly
not less striking.
But, to return to my window at the back of the hotel. Together with
a due contemplation of the fruit-trees, the grapevines, the
buttonwood-tree, the cat, the birds, and many other particulars, I
failed not to study the row of fashionable dwellings to which all
these appertained. Here, it must be confessed, there was a general
sameness. From the upper story to the first floor, they were so much
alike, that I could only conceive of the inhabitants as cut out on
one identical pattern, like little wooden toy-people of German
manufacture. One long, united roof, with its thousands of slates
glittering in the rain, extended over the whole. After the
distinctness of separate characters to which I had recently been
accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me not to be able to resolve
this combination of human interests into well-defined elements. It
seemed hardly worth while for more than one of those families to be
in existence, since they all had the same glimpse of the sky, all
looked into the same area, all received just their equal share of
sunshine through the front windows, and all listened to precisely the
same noises of the street on which they boarded. Men are so much
alike in their nature, that they grow intolerable unless varied by
their circumstances.
Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was, I had
rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.
"Can you tell me," I inquired, "what families reside in any of those
houses opposite?"
"The one right opposite is a rather stylish boarding-house," said the
waiter. "Two of the gentlemen boarders keep horses at the stable of
our establishment. They do things in very good style, sir, the
people that live there."
I might have found out nearly as much for myself, on examining the
house a little more closely, in one of the upper chambers I saw a
young man in a dressing-gown, standing before the glass and brushing
his hair for a quarter of an hour together. He then spent an equal
space of time in the elaborate arrangement of his cravat, and finally
made his appearance in a dress-coat, which I suspected to be newly
come from the tailor's, and now first put on for a dinner-party. At
a window of the next story below, two children, prettily dressed,
were looking out. By and by a middle-aged gentleman came softly
behind them, kissed the little girl, and playfully pulled the little
boy's ear. It was a papa, no doubt, just come in from his
counting-room or office; and anon appeared mamma, stealing as softly
behind papa as he had stolen behind the children, and laying her hand
on his shoulder to surprise him. Then followed a kiss between papa
and mamma; but a noiseless one, for the children did not turn their
heads.
"I bless God for these good folks!" thought I to myself. "I have not
seen a prettier bit of nature, in all my summer in the country, than
they have shown me here, in a rather stylish boarding-house. I will
pay them a little more attention by and by."
On the first floor, an iron balustrade ran along in front of the tall
and spacious windows, evidently belonging to a back drawing-room; and
far into the interior, through the arch of the sliding-doors, I could
discern a gleam from the windows of the front apartment. There were
no signs of present occupancy in this suite of rooms; the curtains
being enveloped in a protective covering, which allowed but a small
portion of their crimson material to be seen. But two housemaids
were industriously at work; so that there was good prospect that the
boarding-house might not long suffer from the absence of its most
expensive and profitable guests. Meanwhile, until they should appear,
I cast my eyes downward to the lower regions. There, in the dusk
that so early settles into such places, I saw the red glow of the
kitchen range. The hot cook, or one of her subordinates, with a
ladle in her hand, came to draw a cool breath at the back door. As
soon as she disappeared, an Irish man-servant, in a white jacket,
crept slyly forth, and threw away the fragments of a china dish,
which, unquestionably, he had just broken. Soon afterwards, a lady,
showily dressed, with a curling front of what must have been false
hair, and reddish-brown, I suppose, in hue,--though my remoteness
allowed me only to guess at such particulars,--this respectable
mistress of the boarding-house made a momentary transit across the
kitchen window, and appeared no more. It was her final,
comprehensive glance, in order to make sure that soup, fish, and
flesh were in a proper state of readiness, before the serving up of
dinner.
There was nothing else worth noticing about the house, unless it be
that on the peak of one of the dormer windows which opened out of the
roof sat a dove, looking very dreary and forlorn; insomuch that I
wondered why she chose to sit there, in the chilly rain, while her
kindred were doubtless nestling in a warm and comfortable dove-cote.
All at once this dove spread her wings, and, launching herself in the
air, came flying so straight across the intervening space, that I
fully expected her to alight directly on my window-sill. In the
latter part of her course, however, she swerved aside, flew upward,
and vanished, as did, likewise, the slight, fantastic pathos with
which I had invested her.
XVIII. THE BOARDING-HOUSE
The next day, as soon as I thought of looking again towards the
opposite house, there sat the dove again, on the peak of the same
dormer window! It was by no means an early hour, for the preceding
evening I had ultimately mustered enterprise enough to visit the
theatre, had gone late to bed, and slept beyond all limit, in my
remoteness from Silas Foster's awakening horn. Dreams had tormented
me throughout the night. The train of thoughts which, for months
past, had worn a track through my mind, and to escape which was one
of my chief objects in leaving Blithedale, kept treading
remorselessly to and fro in their old footsteps, while slumber left
me impotent to regulate them. It was not till I had quitted my three
friends that they first began to encroach upon my dreams. In those
of the last night, Hollingsworth and Zenobia, standing on either side
of my bed, had bent across it to exchange a kiss of passion.
Priscilla, beholding this,--for she seemed to be peeping in at the
chamber window,--had melted gradually away, and left only the sadness
of her expression in my heart. There it still lingered, after I
awoke; one of those unreasonable sadnesses that you know not how to
deal with, because it involves nothing for common-sense to clutch.
It was a gray and dripping forenoon; gloomy enough in town, and still
gloomier in the haunts to which my recollections persisted in
transporting me. For, in spite of my efforts to think of something
else, I thought how the gusty rain was drifting over the slopes and
valleys of our farm; how wet must be the foliage that overshadowed
the pulpit rock; how cheerless, in such a day, my hermitage--the
tree-solitude of my owl-like humors--in the vine-encircled heart of
the tall pine! It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched
myself too suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice,
now, but to bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt
asunder, and that illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago
cut off) by which a past mode of life prolongs itself into the
succeeding one. I was full of idle and shapeless regrets. The
thought impressed itself upon me that I had left duties unperformed.
With the power, perhaps, to act in the place of destiny and avert
misfortune from my friends, I had resigned them to their fate. That
cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with
a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses, appeared
to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.
But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is
cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard
to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much
sympathy, rather than too little.
To escape the irksomeness of these meditations, I resumed my post at
the window. At first sight, there was nothing new to be noticed.
The general aspect of affairs was the same as yesterday, except that
the more decided inclemency of to-day had driven the sparrows to
shelter, and kept the cat within doors; whence, however, she soon
emerged, pursued by the cook, and with what looked like the better
half of a roast chicken in her mouth. The young man in the
dress-coat was invisible; the two children, in the story below,
seemed to be romping about the room, under the superintendence of a
nursery-maid. The damask curtains of the drawing-room, on the first
floor, were now fully displayed, festooned gracefully from top to
bottom of the windows, which extended from the ceiling to the carpet.
A narrower window, at the left of the drawing-room, gave light to
what was probably a small boudoir, within which I caught the faintest
imaginable glimpse of a girl's figure, in airy drapery. Her arm was
in regular movement, as if she were busy with her German worsted, or
some other such pretty and unprofitable handiwork.
While intent upon making out this girlish shape, I became sensible
that a figure had appeared at one of the windows of the drawing-room.
There was a presentiment in my mind; or perhaps my first glance,
imperfect and sidelong as it was, had sufficed to convey subtile
information of the truth. At any rate, it was with no positive
surprise, but as if I had all along expected the incident, that,
directing my eyes thitherward, I beheld--like a full-length picture,
in the space between the heavy festoons of the window curtains--no
other than Zenobia! At the same instant, my thoughts made sure of
the identity of the figure in the boudoir. It could only be
Priscilla.
Zenobia was attired, not in the almost rustic costume which she had
heretofore worn, but in a fashionable morning-dress. There was,
nevertheless, one familiar point. She had, as usual, a flower in her
hair, brilliant and of a rare variety, else it had not been Zenobia.
After a brief pause at the window, she turned away, exemplifying, in
the few steps that removed her out of sight, that noble and beautiful
motion which characterized her as much as any other personal charm.
Not one woman in a thousand could move so admirably as Zenobia. Many
women can sit gracefully; some can stand gracefully; and a few,
perhaps, can assume a series of graceful positions. But natural
movement is the result and expression of the whole being, and cannot
be well and nobly performed unless responsive to something in the
character. I often used to think that music--light and airy, wild
and passionate, or the full harmony of stately marches, in accordance
with her varying mood--should have attended Zenobia's footsteps.
I waited for her reappearance. It was one peculiarity,
distinguishing Zenobia from most of her sex, that she needed for her
moral well-being, and never would forego, a large amount of physical
exercise. At Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth
had ever impeded her daily walks. Here in town, she probably
preferred to tread the extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure
out the miles by spaces of forty feet, rather than bedraggle her
skirts over the sloppy pavements. Accordingly, in about the time
requisite to pass through the arch of the sliding-doors to the front
window, and to return upon her steps, there she stood again, between
the festoons of the crimson curtains. But another personage was now
added to the scene. Behind Zenobia appeared that face which I had
first encountered in the wood-path; the man who had passed, side by
side with her, in such mysterious familiarity and estrangement,
beneath my vine curtained hermitage in the tall pine-tree. It was
Westervelt. And though he was looking closely over her shoulder, it
still seemed to me, as on the former occasion, that Zenobia repelled
him,--that, perchance, they mutually repelled each other, by some
incompatibility of their spheres.
This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of
fancy and prejudice in me. The distance was so great as to
obliterate any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been
made a partaker of their counsels.
There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moodie to complete the
knot of characters, whom a real intricacy of events, greatly assisted
by my method of insulating them from other relations, had kept so
long upon my mental stage, as actors in a drama. In itself, perhaps,
it was no very remarkable event that they should thus come across me,
at the moment when
I imagined myself free. Zenobia, as I well knew, had retained an
establishment in town, and had not unfrequently withdrawn herself
from Blithedale during brief intervals, on one of which occasions she
had taken Priscilla along with her. Nevertheless, there seemed
something fatal in the coincidence that had borne me to this one spot,
of all others in a great city, and transfixed me there, and
compelled me again to waste my already wearied sympathies on affairs
which were none of mine, and persons who cared little for me. It
irritated my nerves; it affected me with a kind of heart-sickness.
After the effort which it cost me to fling them off,--after
consummating my escape, as I thought, from these goblins of flesh and
blood, and pausing to revive myself with a breath or two of an
atmosphere in which they should have no share,--it was a positive
despair to find the same figures arraying themselves before me, and
presenting their old problem in a shape that made it more insoluble
than ever.
I began to long for a catastrophe. If the noble temper of
Hollingsworth's soul were doomed to be utterly corrupted by the too
powerful purpose which had grown out of what was noblest in him; if
the rich and generous qualities of Zenobia's womanhood might not save
her; if Priscilla must perish by her tenderness and faith, so simple
and so devout, then be it so! Let it all come! As for me, I would
look on, as it seemed my part to do, understandingly, if my intellect
could fathom the meaning and the moral, and, at all events,
reverently and sadly. The curtain fallen, I would pass onward with
my poor individual life, which was now attenuated of much of its
proper substance, and diffused among many alien interests.
Meanwhile, Zenobia and her companion had retreated from the window.
Then followed an interval, during which I directed my eves towards
the figure in the boudoir. Most certainly it was Priscilla, although
dressed with a novel and fanciful elegance. The vague perception of
it, as viewed so far off, impressed me as if she had suddenly passed
out of a chrysalis state and put forth wings. Her hands were not now
in motion. She had dropt her work, and sat with her head thrown back,
in the same attitude that I had seen several times before, when she
seemed to be listening to an imperfectly distinguished sound.
Again the two figures in the drawing-room became visible. They were
now a little withdrawn from the window, face to face, and, as I could
see by Zenobia's emphatic gestures, were discussing some subject in
which she, at least, felt a passionate concern. By and by she broke
away, and vanished beyond my ken. Westervelt approached the window,
and leaned his forehead against a pane of glass, displaying the sort
of smile on his handsome features which, when I before met him, had
let me into the secret of his gold-bordered teeth. Every human being,
when given over to the Devil, is sure to have the wizard mark upon
him, in one form or another. I fancied that this smile, with its
peculiar revelation, was the Devil's signet on the Professor.
This man, as I had soon reason to know, was endowed with a cat-like
circumspection; and though precisely the most unspiritual quality in
the world, it was almost as effective as spiritual insight in making
him acquainted with whatever it suited him to discover. He now
proved it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting and
recognizing me, at my post of observation. Perhaps I ought to have
blushed at being caught in such an evident scrutiny of Professor
Westervelt and his affairs. Perhaps I did blush. Be that as it
might, I retained presence of mind enough not to make my position yet
more irksome by the poltroonery of drawing back.
Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room, and beckoned.
Immediately afterwards Zenobia appeared at the window, with color
much heightened, and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were
shooting bright arrows, barbed with scorn, across the intervening
space, directed
full at my sensibilities as a gentleman. If the truth must be told,
far as her flight-shot was, those arrows hit the mark. She signified
her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and hand, comprising
at once a salutation and dismissal. The next moment she administered
one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has at hand, ready
for any offence (and which she so seldom spares on due occasion), by
letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons of the damask
ones. It fell like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the interval
between the acts.
Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir. But the dove still kept
her desolate perch on the peak of the attic window.
XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM
The remainder of the day, so far as I was concerned, was spent in
meditating on these recent incidents. I contrived, and alternately
rejected, innumerable methods of accounting for the presence of
Zenobia and Priscilla, and the connection of Westervelt with both.
It must be owned, too, that I had a keen, revengeful sense of the
insult inflicted by Zenobia's scornful recognition, and more
particularly by her letting down the curtain; as if such were the
proper barrier to be interposed between a character like hers and a
perceptive faculty like mine. For, was mine a mere vulgar curiosity?
Zenobia should have known me better than to suppose it. She should
have been able to appreciate that quality of the intellect and the
heart which impelled me (often against my own will, and to the
detriment of my own comfort) to live in other lives, and to
endeavor--by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions, by taking
note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my human spirit
into manifold accordance with the companions whom God assigned me--to
learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves.
Of all possible observers, methought a woman like Zenobia and a man
like Hollingsworth should have selected me. And now when the event
has long been past, I retain the same opinion of my fitness for the
office. True, I might have condemned them. Had I been judge as well
as witness, my sentence might have been stern as that of destiny
itself. But, still, no trait of original nobility of character, no
struggle against temptation,--no iron necessity of will, on the one
hand, nor extenuating circumstance to be derived from passion and
despair, on the other,--no remorse that might coexist with error,
even if powerless to prevent it,--no proud repentance that should
claim retribution as a meed,--would go unappreciated. True, again, I
might give my full assent to the punishment which was sure to follow.
But it would be given mournfully, and with undiminished love. And,
after all was finished, I would come as if to gather up the white
ashes of those who had perished at the stake, and to tell the
world--the wrong being now atoned for--how much had perished there
which it had never yet known how to praise.
I sat in my rocking-chair, too far withdrawn from the window to
expose myself to another rebuke like that already inflicted. My eyes
still wandered towards the opposite house, but without effecting any
new discoveries. Late in the afternoon, the weathercock on the
church spire indicated a change of wind; the sun shone dimly out, as
if the golden wine of its beams were mingled half-and-half with water.
Nevertheless, they kindled up the whole range of edifices, threw a
glow over the windows, glistened on the wet roofs, and, slowly
withdrawing upward, perched upon the chimney-tops; thence they took a
higher flight, and lingered an instant on the tip of the spire,
making it the final point of more cheerful light in the whole sombre
scene. The next moment, it was all gone. The twilight fell into the
area like a shower of dusky snow, and before it was quite dark, the
gong of the hotel summoned me to tea.
When I returned to my chamber, the glow of an astral lamp was
penetrating mistily through the white curtain of Zenobia's
drawing-room. The shadow of a passing figure was now and then cast
upon this medium, but with too vague an outline for even my
adventurous conjectures to read the hieroglyphic that it presented.
All at once, it occurred to me how very absurd was my behavior in
thus tormenting myself with crazy hypotheses as to what was going on
within that drawing-room, when it was at my option to be personally
present there, My relations with Zenobia, as yet unchanged,--as a
familiar friend, and associated in the same life-long enterprise,--
gave me the right, and made it no more than kindly courtesy
demanded, to call on her. Nothing, except our habitual independence
of conventional rules at Blithedale, could have kept me from sooner
recognizing this duty. At all events, it should now be performed.
In compliance with this sudden impulse, I soon found myself actually
within the house, the rear of which, for two days past, I had been so
sedulously watching. A servant took my card, and, immediately
returning, ushered me upstairs. On the way, I heard a rich, and, as
it were, triumphant burst of music from a piano, in which I felt
Zenobia's character, although heretofore I had known nothing of her
skill upon the instrument. Two or three canary-birds, excited by
this gush of sound, sang piercingly, and did their utmost to produce
a kindred melody. A bright illumination streamed through, the door
of the front drawing-room; and I had barely stept across the
threshold before Zenobia came forward to meet me, laughing, and with
an extended hand.
"Ah, Mr. Coverdale," said she, still smiling, but, as I thought, with
a good deal of scornful anger underneath, "it has gratified me to see
the interest which you continue to take in my affairs! I have long
recognized you as a sort of transcendental Yankee, with all the
native propensity of your countrymen to investigate matters that come
within their range, but rendered almost poetical, in your case, by
the refined methods which you adopt for its gratification. After all,
it was an unjustifiable stroke, on my part,--was it not?--to let
down the window curtain!"
"I cannot call it a very wise one," returned I, with a secret
bitterness, which, no doubt, Zenobia appreciated. "It is really
impossible to hide anything in this world, to say nothing of the next.
All that we ought to ask, therefore, is, that the witnesses of our
conduct, and the speculators on our motives, should be capable of
taking the highest view which the circumstances of the case may admit.
So much being secured, I, for one, would be most happy in feeling
myself followed everywhere by an indefatigable human sympathy."
"We must trust for intelligent sympathy to our guardian angels, if
any there be," said Zenobia. "As long as the only spectator of my
poor tragedy is a young man at the window of his hotel, I must still
claim the liberty to drop the curtain."
While this passed, as Zenobia's hand was extended, I had applied the
very slightest touch of my fingers to her own. In spite of an
external freedom, her manner made me sensible that we stood upon no
real terms of confidence. The thought came sadly across me, how
great was the contrast betwixt this interview and our first meeting.
Then, in the warm light of the country fireside, Zenobia had greeted
me cheerily and hopefully, with a full sisterly grasp of the hand,
conveying as much kindness in it as other women could have evinced by
the pressure of both arms around my neck, or by yielding a cheek to
the brotherly salute. The difference was as complete as between her
appearance at that time--so simply attired, and with only the one
superb flower in her hair--and now, when her beauty was set off by
all that dress and ornament could do for it. And they did much. Not,
indeed, that they created or added anything to what Nature had
lavishly done for Zenobia. But, those costly robes which she had on,
those flaming jewels on her neck, served as lamps to display the
personal advantages which required nothing less than such an
illumination to be fully seen. Even her characteristic flower,
though it seemed to be still there, had undergone a cold and bright
transfiguration; it was a flower exquisitely imitated in jeweller's
work, and imparting the last touch that transformed Zenobia into a
work of art.
"I scarcely feel," I could not forbear saying, "as if we had ever met
before. How many years ago it seems since we last sat beneath
Eliot's pulpit, with Hollingsworth extended on the fallen leaves, and
Priscilla at his feet! Can it be, Zenobia, that you ever really
numbered yourself with our little band of earnest, thoughtful,
philanthropic laborers?"
"Those ideas have their time and place," she answered coldly. "But I
fancy it must be a very circumscribed mind that can find room for no
other."
Her manner bewildered me. Literally, moreover, I was dazzled by the
brilliancy of the room. A chandelier hung down in the centre,
glowing with I know not how many lights; there were separate lamps,
also, on two or three tables, and on marble brackets, adding their
white radiance to that of the chandelier. The furniture was
exceedingly rich. Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely
board and benches in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the
best parlor, it struck me that here was the fulfilment of every
fantasy of an imagination revelling in various methods of costly
self-indulgence and splendid ease. Pictures, marbles, vases,--in
brief, more shapes of luxury than there could be any object in
enumerating, except for an auctioneer's advertisement,--and the whole
repeated and doubled by the reflection of a great mirror, which
showed me Zenobia's proud figure, likewise, and my own. It cost me,
I acknowledge, a bitter sense of shame, to perceive in myself a
positive effort to bear up against the effect which Zenobia sought to
impose on me. I reasoned against her, in my secret mind, and strove
so to keep my footing. In the gorgeousness with which she had
surrounded herself,--in the redundance of personal ornament, which
the largeness of her physical nature and the rich type of her beauty
caused to seem so suitable,--I malevolently beheld the true character
of the woman, passionate, luxurious, lacking simplicity, not deeply
refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste. But, the next instant,
she was too powerful for all my opposing struggles. I saw how fit it
was that she should make herself as gorgeous as she pleased, and
should do a thousand things that would have been ridiculous in the
poor, thin, weakly characters of other women. To this day, however,
I hardly know whether I then beheld Zenobia in her truest attitude,
or whether that were the truer one in which she had presented herself
at Blithedale. In both, there was something like the illusion which
a great actress flings around her.
"Have you given up Blithedale forever?" I inquired.
"Why should you think so?" asked she.
"I cannot tell," answered I; "except that it appears all like a dream
that we were ever there together."
"It is not so to me," said Zenobia. "I should think it a poor and
meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must
convert all the past into a dream merely because the present happens
to be unlike it. Why should we be content with our homely life of a
few months past, to the exclusion of all other modes? It was good;
but there are other lives as good, or better. Not, you will
understand, that I condemn those who give themselves up to it more
entirely than I, for myself, should deem it wise to do."
It irritated me, this self-complacent, condescending, qualified
approval and criticism of a system to which many individuals--perhaps
as highly endowed as our gorgeous Zenobia--had contributed their all
of earthly endeavor, and their loftiest aspirations. I determined to
make proof if there were any spell that would exorcise her out of the
part which she seemed to be acting. She should be compelled to give
me a glimpse of something true; some nature, some passion, no matter
whether right or wrong, provided it were real.
"Your allusion to that class of circumscribed characters who can live
only in one mode of life," remarked I coolly, "reminds me of our poor
friend Hollingsworth. Possibly he was in your thoughts when you
spoke thus. Poor fellow! It is a pity that, by the fault of a
narrow education, he should have so completely immolated himself to
that one idea of his, especially as the slightest modicum of
common-sense would teach him its utter impracticability. Now that I
have returned into the world, and can look at his project from a
distance, it requires quite all my real regard for this respectable
and well-intentioned man to prevent me laughing at him,--as I find
society at large does."
Zenobia's eyes darted lightning, her cheeks flushed, the vividness of
her expression was like the effect of a powerful light flaming up
suddenly within her. My experiment had fully succeeded. She had
shown me the true flesh and blood of her heart, by thus involuntarily
resenting my slight, pitying, half-kind, half-scornful mention of the
man who was all in all with her. She herself probably felt this; for
it was hardly a moment before she tranquillized her uneven breath,
and seemed as proud and self-possessed as ever.
"I rather imagine," said she quietly, "that your appreciation falls
short of Mr. Hollingsworth's just claims. Blind enthusiasm,
absorption in one idea, I grant, is generally ridiculous, and must be
fatal to the respectability of an ordinary man; it requires a very
high and powerful character to make it otherwise. But a great
man--as, perhaps, you do not know--attains his normal condition only
through the inspiration of one great idea. As a friend of Mr.
Hollingsworth, and, at the same time, a calm observer, I must tell
you that he seems to me such a man. But you are very pardonable for
fancying him ridiculous. Doubtless, he is so--to you! There can be
no truer test of the noble and heroic, in any individual, than the
degree in which he possesses the faculty of distinguishing heroism
from absurdity."
I dared make no retort to Zenobia's concluding apothegm. In truth, I
admired her fidelity. It gave me a new sense of Hollingsworth's
native power, to discover that his influence was no less potent with
this beautiful woman here, in the midst of artificial life, than it
had been at the foot of the gray rock, and among the wild birch-trees
of the wood-path, when she so passionately pressed his hand against
her heart. The great, rude, shaggy, swarthy man! And Zenobia loved
him!
"Did you bring Priscilla with you?" I resumed. "Do you know I have
sometimes fancied it not quite safe, considering the susceptibility
of her temperament, that she should be so constantly within the
sphere of a man like Hollingsworth. Such tender and delicate natures,
among your sex, have often, I believe, a very adequate appreciation
of the heroic element in men. But then, again, I should suppose them
as likely as any other women to make a reciprocal impression.
Hollingsworth could hardly give his affections to a person capable of
taking an independent stand, but only to one whom he might absorb
into himself. He has certainly shown great tenderness for Priscilla."
Zenobia had turned aside. But I caught the reflection of her face in
the mirror, and saw that it was very pale,--as pale, in her rich
attire, as if a shroud were round her.
"Priscilla is here," said she, her voice a little lower than usual.
"Have not you learnt as much from your chamber window? Would you
like to see her?"
She made a step or two into the back drawing-room, and called,--
"Priscilla! Dear Priscilla!"
XX. THEY VANISH
Priscilla immediately answered the summons, and made her appearance
through the door of the boudoir. I had conceived the idea, which I
now recognized as a very foolish one, that Zenobia would have taken
measures to debar me from an interview with this girl, between whom
and herself there was so utter an opposition of their dearest
interests, that, on one part or the other, a great grief, if not
likewise a great wrong, seemed a matter of necessity. But, as
Priscilla was only a leaf floating on the dark current of events,
without influencing them by her own choice or plan, as she probably
guessed not whither the stream was bearing her, nor perhaps even felt
its inevitable movement,--there could be no peril of her
communicating to me any intelligence with regard to Zenobia's
purposes.
On perceiving me, she came forward with great quietude of manner; and
when I held out my hand, her own moved slightly towards it, as if
attracted by a feeble degree of magnetism.
"I am glad to see you, my dear Priscilla," said I, still holding her
hand; "but everything that I meet with nowadays makes me wonder
whether I am awake. You, especially, have always seemed like a
figure in a dream, and now more than ever."
"Oh, there is substance in these fingers of mine," she answered,
giving my hand the faintest possible pressure, and then taking away
her own. "Why do you call me a dream? Zenobia is much more like one
than I; she is so very, very beautiful! And, I suppose," added
Priscilla, as if thinking aloud, "everybody sees it, as I do."
But, for my part, it was Priscilla's beauty, not Zenobia's, of which
I was thinking at that moment. She was a person who could be quite
obliterated, so far as beauty went, by anything unsuitable in her
attire; her charm was not positive and material enough to bear up
against a mistaken choice of color, for instance, or fashion. It was
safest, in her case, to attempt no art of dress; for it demanded the
most perfect taste, or else the happiest accident in the world, to
give her precisely the adornment which she needed. She was now
dressed in pure white, set off with some kind of a gauzy fabric,
which--as I bring up her figure in my memory, with a faint gleam on
her shadowy hair, and her dark eyes bent shyly on mine, through all
the vanished years--seems to be floating about her like a mist. I
wondered what Zenobia meant by evolving so much loveliness out of
this poor girl. It was what few women could afford to do; for, as I
looked from one to the other, the sheen and splendor of Zenobia's
presence took nothing from Priscilla's softer spell, if it might not
rather be thought to add to it.
"What do you think of her?" asked Zenobia.
I could not understand the look of melancholy kindness with which
Zenobia regarded her. She advanced a step, and beckoning Priscilla
near her, kissed her cheek; then, with a slight gesture of repulse,
she moved to the other side of the room. I followed.
"She is a wonderful creature," I said. "Ever since she came among us,
I have been dimly sensible of just this charm which you have brought
out. But it was never absolutely visible till now. She is as lovely
as a flower!"
"Well, say so if you like," answered Zenobia. "You are a poet,--at
least, as poets go nowadays,--and must be allowed to make an
opera-glass of your imagination, when you look at women. I wonder,
in such Arcadian freedom of falling in love as we have lately enjoyed,
it never occurred to you to fall in love with Priscilla. In society,
indeed, a genuine American never dreams of stepping across the
inappreciable air-line which separates one class from another. But
what was rank to the colonists of Blithedale?"
"There were other reasons," I replied, "why I should have
demonstrated myself an ass, had I fallen in love with Priscilla. By
the bye, has Hollingsworth ever seen her in this dress?"
"Why do you bring up his name at every turn?" asked Zenobia in an
undertone, and with a malign look which wandered from my face to
Priscilla's. "You know not what you do! It is dangerous, sir,
believe me,
to tamper thus with earnest human passions, out of your own mere
idleness, and for your sport. I will endure it no longer! Take care
that it does not happen again! I warn you!"
"You partly wrong me, if not wholly," I responded. "It is an
uncertain sense of some duty to perform, that brings my thoughts, and
therefore my words, continually to that one point."
"Oh, this stale excuse of duty!" said Zenobia, in a whisper so full
of scorn that it penetrated me like the hiss of a serpent. "I have
often heard it before, from those who sought to interfere with me,
and I know precisely what it signifies. Bigotry; self-conceit; an
insolent curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism,
founded on a shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous
scepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one's
own; a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and
substitute one's self in its awful place,--out of these, and other
motives as miserable as these, comes your idea of duty! But, beware,
sir! With all your fancied acuteness, you step blindfold into these
affairs. For any mischief that may follow your interference, I hold
you responsible!"
It was evident that, with but a little further provocation, the
lioness would turn to bay; if, indeed, such were not her attitude
already. I bowed, and not very well knowing what else to do, was
about to withdraw. But, glancing again towards Priscilla, who had
retreated into a corner, there fell upon my heart an intolerable
burden of despondency, the purport of which I could not tell, but
only felt it to bear reference to her. I approached and held out my
hand; a gesture, however, to which she made no response. It was
always one of her peculiarities that she seemed to shrink from even
the most friendly touch, unless it were Zenobia's or Hollingsworth's.
Zenobia, all this while, stood watching us, but with a careless
expression, as if it mattered very little what might pass.
"Priscilla," I inquired, lowering my voice, "when do you go back to
Blithedale?"
"Whenever they please to take me," said she.
"Did you come away of your own free will?" I asked.
"I am blown about like a leaf," she replied. "I never have any free
will."
"Does Hollingsworth know that you are here?" said I.
"He bade me come," answered Priscilla.
She looked at me, I thought, with an air of surprise, as if the idea
were incomprehensible that she should have taken this step without
his agency.
"What a gripe this man has laid upon her whole being!" muttered I
between my teeth.
"Well, as Zenobia so kindly intimates, I have no more business here.
I wash my hands of it all. On Hollingsworth's head be the
consequences! Priscilla," I added aloud, "I know not that ever we
may meet again. Farewell!"
As I spoke the word, a carriage had rumbled along the street, and
stopt before the house. The doorbell rang, and steps were
immediately afterwards heard on the staircase. Zenobia had thrown a
shawl over her dress.
"Mr. Coverdale," said she, with cool courtesy, "you will perhaps
excuse us. We have an engagement, and are going out."
"Whither?" I demanded.
"Is not that a little more than you are entitled to inquire?" said
she, with a smile. "At all events, it does not suit me to tell you."
The door of the drawing-room opened, and Westervelt appeared. I
observed that he was elaborately dressed, as if for some grand
entertainment. My dislike for this man was infinite. At that moment
it amounted to nothing less than a creeping of the flesh, as when,
feeling about in a dark place, one touches something cold and slimy,
and questions what the secret hatefulness may be. And still I could
not but acknowledge that, for personal beauty, for polish of manner,
for all that externally befits a gentleman, there was hardly another
like him. After bowing to Zenobia, and graciously saluting Priscilla
in her corner, he recognized me by a slight but courteous inclination.
"Come, Priscilla," said Zenobia; "it is time. Mr. Coverdale,
good-evening."
As Priscilla moved slowly forward, I met her in the middle of the
drawing-room.
"Priscilla," said I, in the hearing of them all, "do you know whither
you are going?"
"I do not know," she answered.
"Is it wise to go, and is it your choice to go?" I asked. "If not,
I am your friend, and Hollingsworth's friend. Tell me so, at once."
"Possibly," observed Westervelt, smiling, "Priscilla sees in me an
older friend than either Mr. Coverdale or Mr. Hollingsworth. I shall
willingly leave the matter at her option."
While thus speaking, he made a gesture of kindly invitation, and
Priscilla passed me, with the gliding movement of a sprite, and took
his offered arm. He offered the other to Zenobia; but she turned her
proud and beautiful face upon him with a look which--judging from
what I caught of it in profile--would undoubtedly have smitten the
man dead, had he possessed any heart, or had this glance attained to
it. It seemed to rebound, however, from his courteous visage, like
an arrow from polished steel. They all three descended the stairs;
and when I likewise reached the street door, the carriage was already
rolling away.
XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
Thus excluded from everybody's confidence, and attaining no further,
by my most earnest study, than to an uncertain sense of something
hidden from me, it would appear reasonable that I should have flung
off all these alien perplexities. Obviously, my best course was to
betake myself to new scenes. Here I was only an intruder. Elsewhere
there might be circumstances in which I could establish a personal
interest, and people who would respond, with a portion of their
sympathies, for so much as I should bestow of mine.
Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.
Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I
determined to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining
whether the knot of affairs was as inextricable on that side as I
found it on all others. Being tolerably well acquainted with the old
man's haunts, I went, the next day, to the saloon of a certain
establishment about which he often lurked. It was a reputable place
enough, affording good entertainment in the way of meat, drink, and
fumigation; and there, in my young and idle days and nights, when I
was neither nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching
the staid humors and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.
At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently
to await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner,
took a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the
customary life that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with
a good deal of taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among
them an oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of
juicy tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely
visionary, and incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron. Another
work of high art was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin;
another, the hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny
fur; another, the head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more
exquisitely finished, a brace of canvasback ducks, in which the
mottled feathers were depicted with the accuracy of a daguerreotype.
Some very hungry painter, I suppose, had wrought these subjects of
still-life, heightening his imagination with his appetite, and
earning, it is to be hoped, the privilege of a daily dinner off
whichever of his pictorial viands he liked best.
Then there was a fine old cheese, in which you could almost discern
the mites; and some sardines, on a small plate, very richly done,
and looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered.
All these things were so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have
the genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal
charm; it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest,
and thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to
appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial.
There were pictures, too, of gallant revellers, those of the old time,
Flemish, apparently, with doublets and slashed sleeves, drinking
their wine out of fantastic, long-stemmed glasses; quaffing joyously,
quaffing forever, with inaudible laughter and song; while the
champagne bubbled immortally against their moustaches, or the purple
tide of Burgundy ran inexhaustibly down their throats.
But, in an obscure corner of the saloon, there was a little Picture
excellently done, moreover of a ragged, bloated, New England toper,
stretched out on a bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of
drunkenness. The death-in-life was too well portrayed. You smelt
the fumy liquor that had brought on this syncope. Your only comfort
lay in the forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the poor
caitiff was but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium
tremens, nor so much as a retributive headache, awaited, on the
morrow.
By this time, it being past eleven o'clock, the two bar-keepers of
the saloon were in pretty constant activity. One of these young men
had a rare faculty in the concoction of gin-cocktails. It was a
spectacle to behold, how, with a tumbler in each hand, he tossed the
contents from one to the other. Never conveying it awry, nor
spilling the least drop, he compelled the frothy liquor, as it seemed
to me, to spout forth from one glass and descend into the other, in a
great parabolic curve, as well-defined and calculable as a planet's
orbit. He had a good forehead, with a particularly large development
just above the eyebrows; fine intellectual gifts, no doubt, which he
had educated to this profitable end; being famous for nothing but
gin-cocktails, and commanding a fair salary by his one accomplishment.
These cocktails, and other artificial combinations of liquor, (of
which there were at least a score, though mostly, I suspect,
fantastic in their differences,) were much in favor with the younger
class of customers, who, at farthest, had only reached the second
stage of potatory life. The staunch, old soakers, on the other hand
men who, if put on tap, would have yielded a red alcoholic liquor, by
way of blood usually confined themselves to plain brandy-and-water,
gin, or West India rum; and, oftentimes, they prefaced their dram
with some medicinal remark as to the wholesomeness and stomachic
qualities of that particular drink. Two or three appeared to have
bottles of their own behind the counter; and, winking one red eye to
the bar-keeper, he forthwith produced these choicest and peculiar
cordials, which it was a matter of great interest and favor, among
their acquaintances, to obtain a sip of.
Agreeably to the Yankee habit, under whatever circumstances, the
deportment of all these good fellows, old or young, was decorous and
thoroughly correct. They grew only the more sober in their cups;
there was no confused babble nor boisterous laughter. They sucked in
the joyous fire of the decanters and kept it smouldering in their
inmost recesses, with a bliss known only to the heart which it warmed
and comforted. Their eyes twinkled a little, to be sure; they hemmed
vigorously after each glass, and laid a hand upon the pit of the
stomach, as if the pleasant titillation there was what constituted
the tangible part of their enjoyment. In that spot, unquestionably,
and not in the brain, was the acme of the whole affair. But the true
purpose of their drinking--and one that will induce men to drink, or
do something equivalent, as long as this weary world shall
endure--was the renewed youth and vigor, the brisk, cheerful sense of
things present and to come, with which, for about a quarter of an
hour, the dram permeated their systems. And when such quarters of an
hour can be obtained in some mode less baneful to the great sum of a
man's life,--but, nevertheless, with a little spice of impropriety,
to give it a wild flavor,--we temperance people may ring out our
bells for victory!
The prettiest object in the saloon was a tiny fountain, which threw
up its feathery jet through the counter, and sparkled down again into
an oval basin, or lakelet, containing several goldfishes. There was
a bed of bright sand at the bottom, strewn with coral and rock-work;
and the fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a
golden side, and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like
the fanciful thoughts that coquet with a poet in his dream. Never
before, I imagine, did a company of water-drinkers remain so entirely
uncontaminated by the bad example around them; nor could I help
wondering that it had not occurred to any freakish inebriate to empty
a glass of liquor into their lakelet. What a delightful idea! Who
would not be a fish, if he could inhale jollity with the essential
element of his existence!
I had begun to despair of meeting old Moodie, when, all at once, I
recognized his hand and arm protruding from behind a screen that was
set up for the accommodation of bashful topers. As a matter of
course, he had one of Priscilla's little purses, and was quietly
insinuating it under the notice of a person who stood near. This was
always old Moodie's way. You hardly ever saw him advancing towards
you, but became aware of his proximity without being able to guess
how he had come thither. He glided about like a spirit, assuming
visibility close to your elbow, offering his petty trifles of
merchandise, remaining long enough for you to purchase, if so
disposed, and then taking himself off, between two breaths, while you
happened to be thinking of something else.
By a sort of sympathetic impulse that often controlled me in those
more impressible days of my life, I was induced to approach this old
man in a mode as undemonstrative as his own. Thus, when, according
to his custom, he was probably just about to vanish, he found me at
his elbow.
"Ah!" said he, with more emphasis than was usual with him. "It is Mr.
Coverdale!"
"Yes, Mr. Moodie, your old acquaintance," answered I. "It is some
time now since we ate luncheon together at Blithedale, and a good
deal longer since our little talk together at the street corner."
"That was a good while ago," said the old man.
And he seemed inclined to say not a word more. His existence looked
so colorless and torpid,--so very faintly shadowed on the canvas of
reality,--that I was half afraid lest he should altogether disappear,
even while my eyes were fixed full upon his figure. He was certainly
the wretchedest old ghost in the world, with his crazy hat, the dingy
handkerchief about his throat, his suit of threadbare gray, and
especially that patch over his right eye, behind which he always
seemed to be hiding himself. There was one method, however, of
bringing him out into somewhat stronger relief. A glass of brandy
would effect it. Perhaps the gentler influence of a bottle of claret
might do the same. Nor could I think it a matter for the recording
angel to write down against me, if--with my painful consciousness of
the frost in this old man's blood, and the positive ice that had
congealed about his heart--I should thaw him out, were it only for an
hour, with the summer warmth of a little wine. What else could
possibly be done for him? How else could he be imbued with energy
enough to hope for a happier state hereafter? How else be inspired
to say his prayers? For there are states of our spiritual system
when the throb of the soul's life is too faint and weak to render us
capable of religious aspiration.
"Mr. Moodie," said I, "shall we lunch together? And would you like
to drink a glass of wine?"
His one eye gleamed. He bowed; and it impressed me that he grew to
be more of a man at once, either in anticipation of the wine, or as a
grateful response to my good fellowship in offering it.
"With pleasure," he replied.
The bar-keeper, at my request, showed us into a private room, and
soon afterwards set some fried oysters and a bottle of claret on the
table; and I saw the old man glance curiously at the label of the
bottle, as if to learn the brand.
"It should be good wine," I remarked, "if it have any right to its
label."
"You cannot suppose, sir," said Moodie, with a sigh, "that a poor old
fellow like me knows any difference in wines."
And yet, in his way of handling the glass, in his preliminary snuff
at the aroma, in his first cautious sip of the wine, and the
gustatory skill with which he gave his palate the full advantage of
it, it was impossible not to recognize the connoisseur.
"I fancy, Mr. Moodie," said I, "you are a much better judge of wines
than I have yet learned to be. Tell me fairly,--did you never drink
it where the grape grows?"
"How should that have been, Mr. Coverdale?" answered old Moodie shyly;
but then he took courage, as it were, and uttered a feeble little
laugh. "The flavor of this wine," added he, "and its perfume still
more than its taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man."
"I wish, Mr. Moodie," suggested I,--not that I greatly cared about it,
however, but was only anxious to draw him into some talk about
Priscilla and Zenobia,--"I wish, while we sit over our wine, you
would favor me with a few of those youthful reminiscences."
"Ah," said he, shaking his head, "they might interest you more than
you suppose. But I had better be silent, Mr. Coverdale. If this
good wine,--though claret, I suppose, is not apt to play such a trick,--
but if it should make my tongue run too freely, I could never look
you in the face again."
"You never did look me in the face, Mr. Moodie," I replied, "until
this very moment."
"Ah!" sighed old Moodie.
It was wonderful, however, what an effect the mild grape-juice
wrought upon him. It was not in the wine, but in the associations
which it seemed to bring up. Instead of the mean, slouching, furtive,
painfully depressed air of an old city vagabond, more like a gray
kennel-rat than any other living thing, he began to take the aspect
of a decayed gentleman. Even his garments--especially after I had
myself quaffed a glass or two--looked less shabby than when we first
sat down. There was, by and by, a certain exuberance and
elaborateness of gesture and manner, oddly in contrast with all that
I had hitherto seen of him. Anon, with hardly any impulse from me,
old Moodie began to talk. His communications referred exclusively to
a long-past and more fortunate period of his life, with only a few
unavoidable allusions to the circumstances that had reduced him to
his present state. But, having once got the clew, my subsequent
researches acquainted me with the main facts of the following
narrative; although, in writing it out, my pen has perhaps allowed
itself a trifle of romantic and legendary license, worthier of a
small poet than of a grave biographer.
XXII. FAUNTLEROY
Five-and-twenty years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt in
one of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man
of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure. His
home might almost be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary
sense, princely. His whole being seemed to have crystallized itself
into an external splendor, wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the
world, and had no other life than upon this gaudy surface. He had
married a lovely woman, whose nature was deeper than his own. But
his affection for her, though it showed largely, was superficial,
like all his other manifestations and developments; he did not so
truly keep this noble creature in his heart, as wear her beauty for
the most brilliant ornament of his outward state. And there was born
to him a child, a beautiful daughter, whom he took from the
beneficent hand of God with no just sense of her immortal value, but
as a man already rich in gems would receive another jewel. If he
loved her, it was because she shone.
After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating
continually an unnatural light, the source of it--which was merely
his gold--began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted.
He saw himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore
distinguished him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back
upon, he recoiled from this calamity with the instinct of a soul
shrinking from annihilation. To avoid it,--wretched man!--or rather
to defer it, if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself
the life of a few breaths more amid the false glitter which was now
less his own than ever,--he made himself guilty of a crime. It was
just the sort of crime, growing out of its artificial state, which
society (unless it should change its entire constitution for this
man's unworthy sake) neither could nor ought to pardon. More safely
might it pardon murder. Fauntleroy's guilt was discovered. He fled;
his wife perished, by the necessity of her innate nobleness, in its
alliance with a being so ignoble; and betwixt her mother's death and
her father's ignominy, his daughter was left worse than orphaned.
There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy. His family connections, who
had great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had
attempted to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would
have overtaken an unfriended criminal. The wreck of his estate was
divided among his creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was
forgotten by the multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth
to mouth. Seldom, indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest
former intimates. Nor could it have been otherwise. The man had
laid no real touch on any mortal's heart. Being a mere image, an
optical delusion, created by the sunshine of prosperity, it was his
law to vanish into the shadow of the first intervening cloud. He
seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which, like many others that
attended his brief career, went far to prove the illusiveness of his
existence.
Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally
melted into vapor. He had fled northward to the New England
metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a
squalid street or court of the older portion of the city. There he
dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good
people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest. Many families were
clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the
little peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars. The house
where Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been
a stately habitation in its day. An old colonial governor had built
it, and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room
where now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy's
chamber, which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted.
Tattered hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and
fissures, a richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for
kindling-stuff, a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly
patches of the naked laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as if,
with its splinters and rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of
practical gibe at this poor, ruined man of show.
At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed
Fauntleroy a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love,
perhaps, but lest poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add
more shame to that with which he had already stained them. But he
showed no tendency to further guilt. His character appeared to have
been radically changed (as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well
might) by his miserable fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in
him were portions of the same character, presenting itself in another
phase. Instead of any longer seeking to live in the sight of the
world, his impulse was to shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to
be unseen of men, were it possible, even while standing before their
eyes. He had no pride; it was all trodden in the dust. No
ostentation; for how could it survive, when there was nothing left of
Fauntleroy, save penury and shame! His very gait demonstrated that
he would gladly have faded out of view, and have crept about
invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the irksomeness of
a human glance. Hardly, it was averred, within the memory of those
who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full front to the
world. He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort of noonday
twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with his
morbid intolerance of sunshine.
In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that
condition of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity
and hope. Fauntleroy was again married. He had taken to wife a
forlorn, meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he
found dwelling with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old
gubernatorial residence. This poor phantom--as the beautiful and
noble companion of his former life had done brought him a daughter.
And sometimes, as from one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked
forth out of his present grimy environment into that past
magnificence, and wondered whether the grandee of yesterday or the
pauper of to-day were real. But, in my mind, the one and the other
were alike impalpable. In truth, it was Fauntleroy's fatality to
behold whatever he touched dissolve. After a few years, his second
wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded finally out of the
world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with their pale and
nervous child. And, by this time, among his distant relatives,--with
whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with contagious infamy, and
which they were only too willing to get rid of,--he was himself
supposed to be no more.
The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the
true offspring of both parents, and as the reflection of their state.
She was a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from
all mankind, but in timidity, and no sour repugnance. There was a
lack of human substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up
in a sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure, and trace out
the cracked and dusty window-panes upon the naked floor. But,
nevertheless, the poor child had a heart; and from her mother's
gentle character she had inherited a profound and still capacity of
affection. And so her life was one of love. She bestowed it partly
on her father, but in greater part on an idea.
For Fauntleroy, as they sat by their cheerless fireside,--which was
no fireside, in truth, but only a rusty stove,--had often talked to
the little girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness of his
first wife, and the beautiful child whom she had given him. Instead
of the fairy tales which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this.
And, out of the loneliness of her sad little existence, Priscilla's
love grew, and tended upward, and twined itself perseveringly around
this unseen sister; as a grapevine might strive to clamber out of a
gloomy hollow among the rocks, and embrace a young tree standing in
the sunny warmth above. It was almost like worship, both in its
earnestness and its humility; nor was it the less humble--though the
more earnest--because Priscilla could claim human kindred with the
being whom she, so devoutly loved. As with worship, too, it gave her
soul the refreshment of a purer atmosphere. Save for this singular,
this melancholy, and yet beautiful affection, the child could hardly
have lived; or, had she lived, with a heart shrunken for lack of any
sentiment to fill it, she must have yielded to the barren miseries of
her position, and have grown to womanhood characterless and worthless.
But now, amid all the sombre coarseness of her father's outward
life, and of her own, Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life
within. Some faint gleam thereof was often visible upon her face.
It was as if, in her spiritual visits to her brilliant sister, a
portion of the latter's brightness had permeated our dim Priscilla,
and still lingered, shedding a faint illumination through the
cheerless chamber, after she came back.
As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much
unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected
infancy still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered
strange things about Priscilla. The big, red, Irish matrons, whose
innumerable progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock
at the pale Western child. They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it,
between jest and earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood
as other children, but mixed largely with a thinner element. They
called her ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish when
she pleased, but could never, in her densest moments, make herself
quite visible. The sun at midday would shine through her; in the
first gray of the twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her
outline; and, if you followed the dim thing into a dark corner,
behold! she was not there. And it was true that Priscilla had
strange ways; strange ways, and stranger words, when she uttered any
words at all. Never stirring out of the old governor's dusky house,
she sometimes talked of distant places and splendid rooms, as if she
had just left them. Hidden things were visible to her (at least so
the people inferred from obscure hints escaping unawares out of her
mouth), and silence was audible. And in all the world there was
nothing so difficult to be endured, by those who had any dark secret
to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid and melancholy eyes.
Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other
inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion. The rumor spread thence
into a wider circle. Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called,
used often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his
daughter's gift of second-sight and prophecy. It was a period when
science (though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing
forward, anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had
partially won credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism
had swept away as rubbish. These things were now tossed up again,
out of the surging ocean of human thought and experience. The story
of Priscilla's preternatural manifestations, therefore, attracted a
kind of notice of which it would have been deemed wholly unworthy a
few years earlier. One day a gentleman ascended the creaking
staircase, and inquired which was old Moodie's chamber door. And,
several times, he came again. He was a marvellously handsome man,--
still youthful, too, and fashionably dressed. Except that
Priscilla, in those days, had no beauty, and, in the languor of her
existence, had not yet blossomed into womanhood, there would have
been rich food for scandal in these visits; for the girl was
unquestionably their sole object, although her father was supposed
always to be present. But, it must likewise be added, there was
something about Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and
thus far was she privileged, either by the preponderance of what was
spiritual, or the thin and watery blood that left her cheek so pallid.
Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla in one
way, they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble on
another score. They averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard,
and that he had taken advantage of Priscilla's lack of earthly
substance to subject her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through
whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever happened, in regions
near or remote. The boundaries of his power were defined by the
verge of the pit of Tartarus on the one hand, and the third sphere of
the celestial world on the other. Again, they declared their
suspicion that the wizard, with all his show of manly beauty, was
really an aged and wizened figure, or else that his semblance of a
human body was only a necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical
contrivance, in which a demon walked about. In proof of it, however,
they could merely instance a gold band around his upper teeth, which
had once been visible to several old women, when he smiled at them
from the top of the governor's staircase. Of course this was all
absurdity, or mostly so. But, after every possible deduction, there
remained certain very mysterious points about the stranger's
character, as well as the connection that he established with
Priscilla. Its nature at that period was even less understood than
now, when miracles of this kind have grown so absolutely stale, that
I would gladly, if the truth allowed, dismiss the whole matter from
my narrative.
We must now glance backward, in quest of the beautiful daughter of
Fauntleroy's prosperity. What had become of her? Fauntleroy's only
brother, a bachelor, and with no other relative so near, had adopted
the forsaken child. She grew up in affluence, with native graces
clustering luxuriantly about her. In her triumphant progress towards
womanhood, she was adorned with every variety of feminine
accomplishment. But she lacked a mother's care. With no adequate
control, on any hand (for a man, however stern, however wise, can
never sway and guide a female child), her character was left to shape
itself. There was good in it, and evil. Passionate, self-willed,
and imperious, she had a warm and generous nature; showing the
richness of the soil, however, chiefly by the weeds that flourished
in it, and choked up the herbs of grace. In her girlhood her uncle
died. As Fauntleroy was supposed to be likewise dead, and no other
heir was known to exist, his wealth devolved on her, although, dying
suddenly, the uncle left no will. After his death there were obscure
passages in Zenobia's history. There were whispers of an attachment,
and even a secret marriage, with a fascinating and accomplished but
unprincipled young man. The incidents and appearances, however,
which led to this surmise soon passed away, and were forgotten.
Nor was her reputation seriously affected by the report. In fact, so
great was her native power and influence, and such seemed the
careless purity of her nature, that whatever Zenobia did was
generally acknowledged as right for her to do. The world never
criticised her so harshly as it does most women who transcend its
rules. It almost yielded its assent, when it beheld her stepping out
of the common path, and asserting the more extensive privileges of
her sex, both theoretically and by her practice. The sphere of
ordinary womanhood was felt to be narrower than her development
required.
A portion of Zenobia's more recent life is told in the foregoing
pages. Partly in earnest,--and, I imagine, as was her disposition,
half in a proud jest, or in a kind of recklessness that had grown
upon her, out of some hidden grief,--she had given her countenance,
and promised liberal pecuniary aid, to our experiment of a better
social state. And Priscilla followed her to Blithedale. The sole
bliss of her life had been a dream of this beautiful sister, who had
never so much as known of her existence. By this time, too, the poor
girl was enthralled in an intolerable bondage, from which she must
either free herself or perish. She deemed herself safest near
Zenobia, into whose large heart she hoped to nestle.
One evening, months after Priscilla's departure, when Moodie (or
shall we call him Fauntleroy?) was sitting alone in the state-chamber
of the old governor, there came footsteps up the staircase. There
was a pause on the landing-place. A lady's musical yet haughty
accents were heard making an inquiry from some denizen of the house,
who had thrust a head out of a contiguous chamber. There was then a
knock at Moodie's door. "Come in!" said he.
And Zenobia entered. The details of the interview that followed
being unknown to me,--while, notwithstanding, it would be a pity
quite to lose the picturesqueness of the situation,--I shall attempt
to sketch it, mainly from fancy, although with some general grounds
of surmise in regard to the old man's feelings.
She gazed wonderingly at the dismal chamber. Dismal to her, who
beheld it only for an instant; and how much more so to him, into
whose brain each bare spot on the ceiling, every tatter of the
paper-hangings, and all the splintered carvings of the mantelpiece,
seen wearily through long years, had worn their several prints!
Inexpressibly miserable is this familiarity with objects that have
been from the first disgustful.
"I have received a strange message," said Zenobia, after a moment's
silence, "requesting, or rather enjoining it upon me, to come hither.
Rather from curiosity than any other motive,--and because, though a
woman, I have not all the timidity of one,--I have complied. Can it
be you, sir, who thus summoned me?"
"It was," answered Moodie.
"And what was your purpose?" she continued. "You require charity,
perhaps? In that case, the message might have been more fitly worded.
But you are old and poor, and age and poverty should be allowed
their privileges. Tell me, therefore, to what extent you need my aid."
"Put up your purse," said the supposed mendicant, with an
inexplicable smile. "Keep it,--keep all your wealth,--until I demand
it all, or none! My message had no such end in view. You are
beautiful, they tell me; and I desired to look at you."
He took the one lamp that showed the discomfort and sordidness of his
abode, and approaching Zenobia held it up, so as to gain the more
perfect view of her, from top to toe. So obscure was the chamber,
that you could see the reflection of her diamonds thrown upon the
dingy wall, and flickering with the rise and fall of Zenobia's breath.
It was the splendor of those jewels on her neck, like lamps that
burn before some fair temple, and the jewelled flower in her hair,
more than the murky, yellow light, that helped him to see her beauty.
But he beheld it, and grew proud at heart; his own figure, in spite
of his mean habiliments, assumed an air of state and grandeur.
"It is well," cried old Moodie. "Keep your wealth. You are right
worthy of it. Keep it, therefore, but with one condition only."
Zenobia thought the old man beside himself, and was moved with pity.
"Have you none to care for you?" asked she. "No daughter?--no
kind-hearted neighbor?--no means of procuring the attendance which
you need? Tell me once again, can I do nothing for you?"
"Nothing," he replied. "I have beheld what I wished. Now leave me.
Linger not a moment longer, or I may be tempted to say what would
bring a cloud over that queenly brow. Keep all your wealth, but with
only this one condition: Be kind--be no less kind than sisters
are--to my poor Priscilla!"
And, it may be, after Zenobia withdrew, Fauntleroy paced his gloomy
chamber, and communed with himself as follows,--or, at all events, it
is the only solution which I can offer of the enigma presented in his
character:--"I am unchanged,--the same man as of yore!" said he.
"True, my brother's wealth--he dying intestate--is legally my own. I
know it; yet of my own choice, I live a beggar, and go meanly clad,
and hide myself behind a forgotten ignominy. Looks this like
ostentation? Ah! but in Zenobia I live again! Beholding her, so
beautiful,--so fit to be adorned with all imaginable splendor of
outward state,--the cursed vanity, which, half a lifetime since,
dropt off like tatters of once gaudy apparel from my debased and
ruined person, is all renewed for her sake. Were I to reappear, my
shame would go with me from darkness into daylight. Zenobia has the
splendor, and not the shame. Let the world admire her, and be
dazzled by her, the brilliant child of my prosperity! It is
Fauntleroy that still shines through her!" But then, perhaps,
another thought occurred to him.
"My poor Priscilla! And am I just to her, in surrendering all to
this beautiful Zenobia? Priscilla! I love her best,--I love her
only!--but with shame, not pride. So dim, so pallid, so shrinking,--
the daughter of my long calamity! Wealth were but a mockery in
Priscilla's hands. What is its use, except to fling a golden
radiance around those who grasp it? Yet let Zenobia take heed!
Priscilla shall have no wrong!" But, while the man of show thus
meditated,--that very evening, so far as I can adjust the dates of
these strange incidents,--Priscilla poor, pallid flower!--was either
snatched from Zenobia's hand, or flung wilfully away!
XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL
Well, I betook myself away, and wandered up and down, like an
exorcised spirit that had been driven from its old haunts after a
mighty struggle. It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond
most other things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside
affections that have grown irksome. The bands that were silken once
are apt to become iron fetters when we desire to shake them off. Our
souls, after all, are not our own. We convey a property in them to
those with whom we associate; but to what extent can never be known,
until we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an
exclusive sway over ourselves. Thus, in all the weeks of my absence,
my thoughts continually reverted back, brooding over the bygone
months, and bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a
trace of themselves in their passage. I spent painful hours in
recalling these trifles, and rendering them more misty and
unsubstantial than at first by the quantity of speculative musing
thus kneaded in with them. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These
three had absorbed my life into themselves. Together with an
inexpressible longing to know their fortunes, there was likewise a
morbid resentment of my own pain, and a stubborn reluctance to come
again within their sphere.
All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised in a few brief
and pungent squibs, such as the newspapers were then in the habit of
bestowing on our socialist enterprise. There was one paragraph,
which if I rightly guessed its purport bore reference to Zenobia, but
was too darkly hinted to convey even thus much of certainty.
Hollingsworth, too, with his philanthropic project, afforded the
penny-a-liners a theme for some savage and bloody minded jokes; and,
considerably to my surprise, they affected me with as much
indignation as if we had still been friends.
Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my brown and
toil-hardened hands to reaccustom themselves to gloves. Old habits,
such as were merely external, returned upon me with wonderful
promptitude. My superficial talk, too, assumed altogether a worldly
tone. Meeting former acquaintances, who showed themselves inclined
to ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of human welfare, I spoke
of the recent phase of my life as indeed fair matter for a jest. But,
I also gave them to understand that it was, at most, only an
experiment, on which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear.
It had enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way,
had afforded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity,
and could not, therefore, so far as I was concerned, be reckoned a
failure. In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my
three friends. They dwelt in a profounder region. The more I
consider myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my
connection with those three had affected all my being.
As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time
I was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and
been back again. But my wanderings were confined within a very
limited sphere. I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string
about its leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a
restless activity to no purpose. Thus it was still in our familiar
Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next
particularize an incident.
The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every
village has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or
rather drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the
lecture. Of late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the
natural tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered
for oral methods of addressing the public. But, in halls like this,
besides the winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied
series of other exhibitions. Hither comes the ventriloquist, with
all his mysterious tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his
miraculous transformations of plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes
smoking in your hat, and his cellar of choice liquors represented in
one small bottle. Here, also, the itinerant professor instructs
separate classes of ladies and gentlemen in physiology, and
demonstrates his lessons by the aid of real skeletons, and manikins
in wax, from Paris. Here is to be heard the choir of Ethiopian
melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow or Bunker Hill, or
the moving panorama of the Chinese wall. Here is displayed the
museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism of earthly
renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the Mormon
prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every sort
of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even the
most famous done in wax. And here, in this many-purposed hall
(unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their
share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with later
patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England character),--
here the company of strolling players sets up its little stage, and
claims patronage for the legitimate drama.
But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, a number of printed
handbills--stuck up in the bar-room, and on the sign-post of the
hotel, and on the meeting-house porch, and distributed largely
through the village--had promised the inhabitants an interview with
that celebrated and hitherto inexplicable phenomenon, the Veiled Lady!
The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical descent of seats
towards a platform, on which stood a desk, two lights, a stool, and a
capacious antique chair. The audience was of a generally decent and
respectable character: old farmers, in their Sunday black coats, with
shrewd, hard, sun-dried faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any
other expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire;
pretty young men,--the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law,
the shop-keeper,--all looking rather suburban than rural. In these
days, there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor
of the soil leaves its earth-mould on the person. There was likewise
a considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of
them stern in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very definite
line of eyebrow; a type of womanhood in which a bold intellectual
development seems to be keeping pace with the progressive delicacy of
the physical constitution. Of all these people I took note, at first,
according to my custom. But I ceased to do so the moment that my
eyes fell on an individual who sat two or three seats below me,
immovable, apparently deep in thought, with his back, of course,
towards me, and his face turned steadfastly upon the platform.
After sitting awhile in contemplation of this person's familiar
contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over the intervening
benches, lay my hand on his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear,
and address him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whisper: "Hollingsworth!
where have you left Zenobia?"
His nerves, however, were proof against my attack. He turned half
around, and looked me in the face with great sad eyes, in which there
was neither kindness nor resentment, nor any perceptible surprise.
"Zenobia, when I last saw her," he answered, "was at Blithedale."
He said no more. But there was a great deal of talk going on near me,
among a knot of people who might be considered as representing the
mysticism, or rather the mystic sensuality, of this singular age.
The nature of the exhibition that was about to take place had
probably given the turn to their conversation.
I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories
than ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple,
unimaginative steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in
compelling the auditor to receive them into the category of
established facts. He cited instances of the miraculous power of one
human being over the will and passions of another; insomuch that
settled grief was but a shadow beneath the influence of a man
possessing this potency, and the strong love of years melted away
like a vapor. At the bidding of one of these wizards, the maiden,
with her lover's kiss still burning on her lips, would turn from him
with icy indifference; the newly made widow would dig up her buried
heart out of her young husband's grave before the sods had taken root
upon it; a mother with her babe's milk in her bosom would thrust away
her child. Human character was but soft wax in his hands; and guilt,
or virtue, only the forms into which he should see fit to mould it.
The religious sentiment was a flame which he could blow up with his
breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish. It is
unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and saw
that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was
virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present
life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was
made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not
worth acceptance. But I would have perished on the spot sooner than
believe it.
The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed
in their train,--such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells
self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on jew's-harps,--
had not yet arrived. Alas, my countrymen, methinks we have fallen
on an evil age! If these phenomena have not humbug at the bottom, so
much the worse for us. What can they indicate, in a spiritual way,
except that the soul of man is descending to a lower point than it
has ever before reached while incarnate? We are pursuing a downward
course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into the same
range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and evil
lives, has degraded below humanity! To hold intercourse with spirits
of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more vile
than earthly dust. These goblins, if they exist at all, are but the
shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged
unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition,
dwindling gradually into nothingness. The less we have to say to
them the better, lest we share their fate!
The audience now began to be impatient; they signified their desire
for the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of
boot-heels. Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to
their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes,
looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights. He came
upon the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with
a salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing
his nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak. The
environment of the homely village hall, and the absence of many
ingenious contrivances of stage effect with which the exhibition had
heretofore been set off, seemed to bring the artifice of this
character more openly upon the surface. No sooner did I behold the
bearded enchanter, than, laying my hand again on Hollingsworth's
shoulder, I whispered in his ear, "Do you know him?"
"I never saw the man before," he muttered, without turning his head.
But I had seen him three times already.
Once, on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second time,
in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in Zenobia's
drawing-room. It was Westervelt. A quick association of ideas made
me shudder from head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit,
bringing up reminiscences of a man's sins, I whispered a question in
Hollingsworth's ear,--"What have you done with Priscilla?"
He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife into him,
writhed himself round on his seat, glared fiercely into my eyes, but
answered not a word.
The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the psychological
phenomena, as he termed them, which it was his purpose to exhibit to
the spectators. There remains no very distinct impression of it on
my memory. It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive
show of spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and
dead materialism. I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing
out of a sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along
with it. He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an
era that would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we
call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both
worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood. He described
(in a strange, philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were
a matter of chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty
result was to be effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he
pretended to hold up a portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as
he affirmed it to be, in a glass phial.
At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his hand,--
once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the platform,
enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness. It fell about her
like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so that
the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately discerned.
But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and
unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle
of thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere
with which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was
wholly unconscious of being the central object to all those straining
eyes.
Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at
the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in
the great chair. Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,
perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as
anything that stage trickery could devise. The hushed breathing of
the spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of
the wonders to be performed through the medium of this
incomprehensible creature. I, too, was in breathless suspense, but
with a far different presentiment of some strange event at hand.
"You see before you the Veiled Lady, said the bearded Professor,
advancing to the verge of the platform. "By the agency of which I
have just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the
spiritual world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment,
having been dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the
potency of my art, with the fluid medium of spirits. Slight and
ethereal as it seems, the limitations of time and space have no
existence within its folds. This hall--these hundreds of faces,
encompassing her within so narrow an amphitheatre--are of thinner
substance, in her view, than the airiest vapor that the clouds are
made of. She beholds the Absolute!"
As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological
experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should
endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such
methods--provided only no touch were laid upon her person--as they
might deem best adapted to that end. Accordingly, several
deep-lunged country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown
the apparition away with a breath, ascended the platform. Mutually
encouraging one another, they shouted so close to her ear that the
veil stirred like a wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the
floor with bludgeons; they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that
methought it might have reached, at least, a little way into the
eternal sphere. Finally, with the assent of the Professor, they laid
hold of the great chair, and were startled, apparently, to find it
soar upward, as if lighter than the air through which it rose. But
the Veiled Lady remained
seated and motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than
awful, because implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and
these rude persecutors.
"These efforts are wholly without avail," observed the Professor, who
had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference. "The roar
of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady. And
yet, were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the
desert wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the
icebergs grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle
of a leaf in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of
the bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of
her love. Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my
own behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or
arise out of that chair."
Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just as he spoke
these words, the Veiled Lady arose. There was a mysterious tremor
that shook the magic veil. The spectators, it may be, imagined that
she was about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the
society of those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her
so near akin. Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform,
and now stood gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that
brought the whole power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his
glance.
"Come," said he, waving his hand towards her. "You are safe!"
She threw off the veil, and stood before that multitude of people
pale, tremulous, shrinking, as if only then had she discovered that a
thousand eyes were gazing at her. Poor maiden! How strangely had
she been betrayed! Blazoned abroad as a wonder of the world, and
performing what were adjudged as miracles,--in the faith of many, a
seeress and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment of others, a
mountebank,--she had kept, as I religiously believe, her virgin
reserve and sanctity of soul throughout it all. Within that
encircling veil, though an evil hand had flung it over her, there was
as deep a seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the while, been
sitting under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit, in the Blithedale woods,
at the feet of him who now summoned her to the shelter of his arms.
And the true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for
the jugglery that had hitherto environed her. She uttered a shriek,
and fled to Hollingsworth, like one escaping from her deadliest enemy,
and was safe forever.
XXIV. THE MASQUERADERS
Two nights had passed since the foregoing occurrences, when, in a
breezy September forenoon, I set forth from town, on foot, towards
Blithedale. It was the most delightful of all days for a walk, with
a dash of invigorating ice-temper in the air, but a coolness that
soon gave place to the brisk glow of exercise, while the vigor
remained as elastic as before. The atmosphere had a spirit and
sparkle in it. Each breath was like a sip of ethereal wine, tempered,
as I said, with a crystal lump of ice. I had started on this
expedition in an exceedingly sombre mood, as well befitted one who
found himself tending towards home, but was conscious that nobody
would be quite overjoyed to greet him there. My feet were hardly off
the pavement, however, when this morbid sensation began to yield to
the lively influences of air and motion. Nor had I gone far, with
fields yet green on either side, before my step became as swift and
light as if Hollingsworth were waiting to exchange a friendly
hand-grip, and Zenobia's and Priscilla's open arms would welcome the
wanderer's reappearance. It has happened to me on other occasions,
as well as this, to prove how a state of physical well-being can
create a kind of joy, in spite of the profoundest anxiety of mind.
The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny freshness,
through my memory. I know not why it should be so. But my mental
eye can even now discern the September grass, bordering the pleasant
roadside with a brighter verdure than while the summer heats were
scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green, although here and there a
branch or shrub has donned its vesture of crimson and gold a week or
two before its fellows. I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their
small clusters of scarlet fruit; the toadstools, likewise,--some
spotlessly white, others yellow or red,--mysterious growths,
springing suddenly from no root or seed, and growing nobody can tell
how or wherefore. In this respect they resembled many of the
emotions in my breast. And I still see the little rivulets, chill,
clear, and bright, that murmured beneath the road, through
subterranean rocks, and deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish
were darting to and fro, and within which lurked the hermit frog.
But no,--I never can account for it, that, with a yearning interest
to learn the upshot of all my story, and returning to Blithedale for
that sole purpose, I should examine these things so like a
peaceful-bosomed naturalist. Nor why, amid all my sympathies and
fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration through my frame.
Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that
Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of
ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,
and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little
beyond the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!
They glided mistily before me, as I walked. Sometimes, in my
solitude, I laughed with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering
how unreservedly I had given up my heart and soul to interests that
were not mine. What had I ever had to do with them? And why, being
now free, should I take this thraldom on me once again? It was both
sad and dangerous, I whispered to myself, to be in too close affinity
with the passions, the errors, and the misfortunes of individuals who
stood within a circle of their own, into which, if I stept at all, it
must be as an intruder, and at a peril that I could not estimate.
Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept
alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy. I indulged in a
hundred odd and extravagant conjectures. Either there was no such
place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of
thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else
it was all changed during my absence. It had been nothing but dream
work and enchantment. I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse,
and for the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres
of Indian corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I
had imagined. It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness.
These vagaries were of the spectral throng so apt to steal out of an
unquiet heart. They partly ceased to haunt me, on my arriving at a
point whence, through the trees, I began to catch glimpses of the
Blithedale farm. That surely was something real. There was hardly a
square foot of all those acres on which I had not trodden heavily, in
one or another kind of toil. The curse of Adam's posterity--and,
curse or blessing be it, it gives substance to the life around
us--had first come upon me there. In the sweat of my brow I had
there earned bread and eaten it, and so established my claim to be on
earth, and my fellowship with all the sons of labor. I could have
knelt down, and have laid my breast against that soil. The red clay
of which my frame was moulded seemed nearer akin to those crumbling
furrows than to any other portion of the world's dust. There was my
home, and there might be my grave.
I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of
presenting myself before my old associates, without first
ascertaining the state in which they were. A nameless foreboding
weighed upon me. Perhaps, should I know all the circumstances that
had occurred, I might find it my wisest course to turn back,
unrecognized, unseen, and never look at Blithedale more. Had it been
evening, I would have stolen softly to some lighted window of the old
farmhouse, and peeped darkling in, to see all their well-known faces
round the supper-board. Then, were there a vacant seat, I might
noiselessly unclose the door, glide in, and take my place among them,
without a word. My entrance might be so quiet, my aspect so familiar,
that they would forget how long I had been away, and suffer me to
melt into the scene, as a wreath of vapor melts into a larger cloud.
I dreaded a boisterous greeting. Beholding me at table, Zenobia, as
a matter of course, would send me a cup of tea, and Hollingsworth
fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy, and Priscilla, in her
quiet way, would hand the cream, and others help me to the bread and
butter. Being one of them again, the knowledge of what had happened
would come to me without a shock. For still, at every turn of my
shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face that some evil
thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.
Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the
woods, resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily
as the wild Indian before he makes his onset. I would go wandering
about the outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a
solitary acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of
the trees (a kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant,
like myself), and entreat him to tell me how all things were.
The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up
beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who
chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough. I trod along by
the dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one
of its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the
barkless stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting
itself to my fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was,
and if any overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in
thither, and if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier.
And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the
inscrutable depth, clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the
gripe of its old despair. So slight, however, was the track of these
gloomy ideas, that I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood
of wild ducks, which were floating on the river, and anon took flight,
leaving each a bright streak over the black surface. By and by, I
came to my hermitage, in the heart of the white-pine tree, and
clambering up into it, sat down to rest. The grapes, which I had
watched throughout the summer, now dangled around me in abundant
clusters of the deepest purple, deliciously sweet to the taste, and,
though wild, yet free from that ungentle flavor which distinguishes
nearly all our native and uncultivated grapes. Methought a wine
might be pressed out of them possessing a passionate zest, and
endowed with a new kind of intoxicating quality, attended with such
bacchanalian ecstasies as the tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and
the Rhine are inadequate to produce. And I longed to quaff a great
goblet of it that moment!
While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out of the
peep-holes of my hermitage, and saw the farmhouse, the fields, and
almost every part of our domain, but not a single human figure in the
landscape. Some of the windows of the house were open, but with no
more signs of life than in a dead man's unshut eyes. The barn-door
was ajar, and swinging in the
breeze. The big old dog,--he was a relic of the former dynasty of
the farm,--that hardly ever stirred out of the yard, was nowhere to
be seen. What, then, had become of all the fraternity and
sisterhood? Curious to ascertain this point, I let myself down out
of the tree, and going to the edge of the wood, was glad to perceive
our herd of cows chewing the cud or grazing not far off. I fancied,
by their manner, that two or three of them recognized me (as, indeed,
they ought, for I had milked them and been their chamberlain times
without number); but, after staring me in the face a little while,
they phlegmatically began grazing and chewing their cuds again. Then
I grew foolishly angry at so cold a reception, and flung some rotten
fragments of an old stump at these unsentimental cows.
Skirting farther round the pasture, I heard voices and much laughter
proceeding from the interior of the wood. Voices, male and feminine;
laughter, not only of fresh young throats, but the bass of grown
people, as if solemn organ-pipes should pour out airs of merriment.
Not a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a laugh, but
its cadences were familiar. The wood, in this portion of it, seemed
as full of jollity as if Comus and his crew were holding their revels
in one of its usually lonesome glades. Stealing onward as far as I
durst, without hazard of discovery, I saw a concourse of strange
figures beneath the overshadowing branches. They appeared, and
vanished, and came again, confusedly with the streaks of sunlight
glimmering down upon them.
Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers, and war-paint,
and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his woodland
bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended
by our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound. Drawing an arrow
from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture, and hit the very tree
behind which I happened to be lurking. Another group consisted of a
Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two
foresters of the Middle Ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed
hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder, quaint,
demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted. Shepherds of Arcadia, and
allegoric figures from the "Faerie Queen," were oddly mixed up with
these. Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange
discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary
officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and queues longer than
their swords. A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little
gypsy, with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another,
telling fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old
witch of Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the
midst, as if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of
her necromantic art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree
near by, in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did
more to disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee
observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in
the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.
A little farther off, some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all
with portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the
leaf-strewn earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom
I recognized the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned
his fiddle, and summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before
partaking of the festal cheer. So they joined hands in a circle,
whirling round so swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune
with the Satanic music, that their separate incongruities were
blended all together, and they became a kind of entanglement that
went nigh to turn one's brain with merely looking at it. Anon they
stopt all of a sudden, and staring at one another's figures, set up a
roar of laughter; whereat a shower of the September leaves (which,
all day long, had been hesitating whether to fall or no) were shaken
off by the movement of the air, and came eddying down upon the
revellers.
Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence, at the deepest point of
which, tickled by the oddity of surprising my grave associates in
this masquerading trim, I could not possibly refrain from a burst of
laughter on my own separate account;
"Hush!" I heard the pretty gypsy fortuneteller say. "Who is that
laughing?"
"Some profane intruder!" said the goddess Diana. "I shall send an
arrow through his heart, or change him into a stag, as I did Actaeon,
if he peeps from behind the trees!"
"Me take his scalp!" cried the Indian chief, brandishing his tomahawk,
and cutting a great caper in the air.
"I'll root him in the earth with a spell that I have at my tongue's
end!" squeaked Moll Pitcher. "And the green moss shall grow all over
him, before he gets free again!"
"The voice was Miles Coverdale's," said the fiendish fiddler, with a
whisk of his tail and a toss of his horns. "My music has brought him
hither. He is always ready to dance to the Devil's tune!"
Thus put on the right track, they all recognized the voice at once,
and set up a simultaneous shout.
"Miles! Miles! Miles Coverdale, where are you?" they cried.
"Zenobia! Queen Zenobia! here is one of your vassals lurking in the
wood. Command him to approach and pay his duty!"
The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in pursuit of me,
so that I was like a mad poet hunted by chimeras. Having fairly the
start of them, however, I succeeded in making my escape, and soon
left their merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear. Its
fainter tones assumed a kind of mournfulness, and were finally lost
in the hush and solemnity of the wood. In my haste, I stumbled over
a heap of logs and sticks that had been cut for firewood, a great
while ago, by some former possessor of the soil, and piled up square,
in order to be carted or sledded away to the farmhouse. But, being
forgotten, they had lain there perhaps fifty years, and possibly much
longer; until, by the accumulation of moss, and the leaves falling
over them, and decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound
was formed, in which the softened outline of the woodpile was still
perceptible. In the fitful mood that then swayed my mind, I found
something strangely affecting in this simple circumstance. I
imagined the long-dead woodman, and his long-dead wife and children,
coming out of their chill graves, and essaying to make a fire with
this heap of mossy fuel!
From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie, and neither
knew nor cared whither I was going, until a low, soft,
well-remembered voice spoke, at a little distance.
"There is Mr. Coverdale!"
"Miles Coverdale!" said another voice,--and its tones were very stern.
"Let him come forward, then!"
"Yes, Mr. Coverdale," cried a woman's voice,--clear and melodious,
but, just then, with something unnatural in its chord,--"you are
welcome! But you come half an hour too late, and have missed a scene
which you would have enjoyed!"
I looked up and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at the base of
which sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at his feet and Zenobia
standing before them.
XXV. THE THREE TOGETHER
Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress. Priscilla wore a
pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash,
which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the
strings. But Zenobia (whose part among the maskers, as may be
supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful
magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of
what resembled a leafy crown, or coronet. She represented the
Oriental princess by whose name we were accustomed to know her. Her
attitude was free and noble; yet, if a queen's, it was not that of a
queen triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for her life, or, perchance,
condemned already. The spirit of the conflict seemed, nevertheless,
to be alive in her. Her eyes were on fire; her cheeks had each a
crimson spot, so exceedingly vivid, and marked with so definite an
outline, that I at first doubted whether it were not artificial. In
a very brief space, however, this idea was shamed by the paleness
that ensued, as the blood sunk suddenly away. Zenobia now looked
like marble.
One always feels the fact, in an instant, when he has intruded on
those who love, or those who hate, at some acme of their passion that
puts them into a sphere of their own, where no other spirit can
pretend to stand on equal ground with them. I was confused,--
affected even with a species of terror,--and wished myself away.
The intenseness of their feelings gave them the exclusive property of
the soil and atmosphere, and left me no right to be or breathe there.
"Hollingsworth,--Zenobia,--I have just returned to Blithedale," said
I, "and had no thought of finding you here. We shall meet again at
the house. I will retire."
"This place is free to you," answered Hollingsworth.
"As free as to ourselves," added Zenobia. "This long while past, you
have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the
dark corners of the heart. Had you been here a little sooner, you
might have seen them dragged into the daylight. I could even wish to
have my trial over again, with you standing by to see fair play! Do
you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life?"
She laughed, while speaking thus. But, in truth, as my eyes wandered
from one of the group to another, I saw in Hollingsworth all that an
artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate
holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft; in Zenobia,
the sorceress herself, not aged, wrinkled, and decrepit, but fair
enough to tempt Satan with a force reciprocal to his own; and, in
Priscilla, the pale victim, whose soul and body had been wasted by
her spells. Had a pile of fagots been heaped against the rock, this
hint of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture.
"It was too hard upon me," continued Zenobia, addressing
Hollingsworth, "that judge, jury, and accuser should all be
comprehended in one man! I demur, as I think the lawyers say, to the
jurisdiction. But let the learned Judge Coverdale seat himself on
the top of the rock, and you and me stand at its base, side by side,
pleading our cause before him! There might, at least, be two
criminals instead of one."
"You forced this on me," replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly
in the face. "Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders
yonder? Do I assume to be your judge? No; except so far as I have
an unquestionable right of judgment, in order to settle my own line
of behavior towards those with whom the events of life bring me in
contact. True, I have already judged you, but not on the world's
part,--neither do I pretend to pass a sentence!"
"Ah, this is very good!" cried Zenobia with a smile. "What strange
beings you men are, Mr. Coverdale!--is it not so? It is the simplest
thing in the world with you to bring a woman before your secret
tribunals, and judge and condemn her unheard, and then tell her to go
free without a sentence. The misfortune is, that this same secret
tribunal chances to be the only judgment-seat that a true woman
stands in awe of, and that any verdict short of acquittal is
equivalent to a death sentence!"
The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my
impression that a crisis had just come and gone. On Hollingsworth's
brow it had left a stamp like that of irrevocable doom, of which his
own will was the instrument. In Zenobia's whole person, beholding
her more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious
disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished
one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed
to renew the contest. My sensations were as if I had come upon a
battlefield before the smoke was as yet cleared away.
And what subjects had been discussed here? All, no doubt, that for
so many months past had kept my heart and my imagination idly
feverish. Zenobia's whole character and history; the true nature of
her mysterious connection with Westervelt; her later purposes towards
Hollingsworth, and, reciprocally, his in reference to her; and,
finally, the degree in which Zenobia had been cognizant of the plot
against Priscilla, and what, at last, had been the real object of
that scheme. On these points, as before, I was left to my own
conjectures. One thing, only, was certain. Zenobia and
Hollingsworth were friends no longer. If their heartstrings were
ever intertwined, the knot had been adjudged an entanglement, and was
now violently broken.
But Zenobia seemed unable to rest content with the matter in the
posture which it had assumed.
"Ah! do we part so?" exclaimed she, seeing Hollingsworth about to
retire.
"And why not?" said he, with almost rude abruptness. "What is there
further to be said between us?"
"Well, perhaps nothing," answered Zenobia, looking him in the face,
and smiling. "But we have come many times before to this gray rock,
and we have talked very softly among the whisperings of the
birch-trees. They were pleasant hours! I love to make the latest of
them, though not altogether so delightful, loiter away as slowly as
may be. And, besides, you have put many queries to me at this, which
you design to be our last interview; and being driven, as I must
acknowledge, into a corner, I have responded with reasonable
frankness. But now, with your free consent, I desire the privilege
of asking a few questions, in my turn."
"I have no concealments," said Hollingsworth.
"We shall see," answered Zenobia. "I would first inquire whether you
have supposed me to be wealthy?"
"On that point," observed Hollingsworth, "I have had the opinion
which the world holds."
"And I held it likewise," said Zenobia. "Had I not, Heaven is my
witness the knowledge should have been as free to you as me. It is
only three days since I knew the strange fact that threatens to make
me poor; and your own acquaintance with it, I suspect, is of at least
as old a date. I fancied myself affluent. You are aware, too, of
the disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my
imaginary opulence,--nay, were it all, I had not hesitated. Let me
ask you, further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact,
on which depended this--as the world would consider it--so important
sacrifice?"
"You certainly spoke of none," said Hollingsworth.
"Nor meant any," she responded. "I was willing to realize your dream
freely,--generously, as some might think,--but, at all events, fully,
and heedless though it should prove the ruin of my fortune.
If, in your own thoughts, you have imposed any conditions of this
expenditure, it is you that must be held responsible for whatever is
sordid and unworthy in them. And now one other question. Do you
love this girl?"
"O Zenobia!" exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back, as if longing for
the rock to topple over and hide her.
"Do you love her?" repeated Zenobia.
"Had you asked me that question a short time since," replied
Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which, it seemed to me, even the
birch-trees held their whispering breath, "I should have told
you--'No!' My feelings for Priscilla differed little from those of an
elder brother, watching tenderly over the gentle sister whom God has
given him to protect."
"And what is your answer now?" persisted Zenobia.
"I do love her!" said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep
inward breath, instead of speaking them outright. "As well declare
it thus as in any other way. I do love her!"
"Now, God be judge between us," cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden
passion, "which of us two has most mortally offended Him! At least,
I am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had,--
weak, vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues,
when we have any, are merely impulsive and intuitive), passionate,
too, and pursuing my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and
cunning, though absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond-slave
must; false, moreover, to the whole circle of good, in my reckless
truth to the little good I saw before me,--but still a woman! A
creature whom only a little change of earthly fortune, a little
kinder smile of Him who sent me hither, and one true heart to
encourage and direct me, might have made all that a woman can be!
But how is it with you? Are you a man? No; but a monster! A cold,
heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism!"
"With what, then, do you charge me!" asked Hollingsworth, aghast, and
greatly disturbed by this attack. "Show me one selfish end, in all I
ever aimed at, and you may cut it out of my bosom with a knife!"
"It is all self!" answered Zenobia with still intenser bitterness.
"Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self! The fiend, I doubt not,
has made his choicest mirth of you these seven years past, and
especially in the mad summer which we have spent together. I see it
now! I am awake, disenchanted, disinthralled! Self, self, self!
You have embodied yourself in a project. You are a better
masquerader than the witches and gypsies yonder; for your disguise is
a self-deception. See whither it has brought you! First, you aimed
a death-blow, and a treacherous one, at this scheme of a purer and
higher life, which so many noble spirits had wrought out. Then,
because Coverdale could not be quite your slave, you threw him
ruthlessly away. And you took me, too, into your plan, as long as
there was hope of my being available, and now fling me aside again, a
broken tool! But, foremost and blackest of your sins, you stifled
down your inmost consciousness!--you did a deadly wrong to your own
heart!--you were ready to sacrifice this girl, whom, if God ever
visibly showed a purpose, He put into your charge, and through whom
He was striving to redeem you!"
"This is a woman's view," said Hollingsworth, growing deadly pale,--
"a woman's, whose whole sphere of action is in the heart, and who
can conceive of no higher nor wider one!"
"Be silent!" cried Zenobia imperiously. "You know neither man nor
woman! The utmost that can be said in your behalf--and because I
would not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain excuse
my wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say
it--is, that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast.
Leave me, now. You
have done with me, and I with you. Farewell!"
"Priscilla," said Hollingsworth, "come." Zenobia smiled; possibly I
did so too. Not often, in human life, has a gnawing sense of injury
found a sweeter morsel of revenge than was conveyed in the tone with
which Hollingsworth spoke those two words. It was the abased and
tremulous tone of a man whose faith in himself was shaken, and who
sought, at last, to lean on an affection. Yes; the strong man bowed
himself and rested on this poor Priscilla! Oh, could she have failed
him, what a triumph for the lookers-on!
And, at first, I half imagined that she was about to fail him. She
rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her
head, and then slowly tottered, rather than walked, towards Zenobia.
Arriving at her feet, she sank down there, in the very same attitude
which she had assumed on their first meeting, in the kitchen of the
old farmhouse. Zenobia remembered it.
"Ah, Priscilla!" said she, shaking her head, "how much is changed
since then! You kneel to a dethroned princess. You, the victorious
one! But he is waiting for you. Say what you wish, and leave me."
"We are sisters!" gasped Priscilla.
I fancied that I understood the word and action. It meant the
offering of herself, and all she had, to be at Zenobia's disposal.
But the latter would not take it thus.
"True, we are sisters!" she replied; and, moved by the sweet word,
she stooped down and kissed Priscilla; but not lovingly, for a sense
of fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia's
heart. "We had one father! You knew it from the first; I, but a
little while,--else some things that have chanced might have been
spared you. But I never wished you harm. You stood between me and
an end which I desired. I wanted a clear path. No matter what I
meant. It is over now. Do you forgive me?"
"O Zenobia," sobbed Priscilla, "it is I that feel like the guilty one!"
"No, no, poor little thing!" said Zenobia, with a sort of contempt.
"You have been my evil fate, but there never was a babe with less
strength or will to do an injury. Poor child! Methinks you have but
a melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide,
cheerless heart, where, for aught you know,--and as I, alas! believe,--
the fire which you have kindled may soon go out. Ah, the thought
makes me shiver for you! What will you do, Priscilla, when you find
no spark among the ashes?"
"Die!" she answered.
"That was well said!" responded Zenobia, with an approving smile.
"There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister.
Meanwhile, go with him, and live!"
She waved her away with a queenly gesture, and turned her own face to
the rock. I watched Priscilla, wondering what judgment she would
pass between Zenobia and Hollingsworth; how interpret his behavior,
so as to reconcile it with true faith both towards her sister and
herself; how compel her love for him to keep any terms whatever with
her sisterly affection! But, in truth, there was no such difficulty
as I imagined. Her engrossing love made it all clear. Hollingsworth
could have no fault. That was the one principle at the centre of the
universe. And the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other
people, appearances, self-evident facts, the testimony of her own
senses,--even Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,--
would have weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the
other side. So secure was she of his right, that she never thought
of comparing it with another's wrong, but left the latter to itself.
Hollingsworth drew her arm within his, and soon disappeared with her
among the trees. I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were
out of sight; she never glanced again towards them. But, retaining a
proud attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look,
they were no sooner departed,--utterly departed,--than she began
slowly to sink down. It was as if a great, invisible, irresistible
weight were pressing her to the earth. Settling upon her knees, she
leaned her forehead against the rock, and sobbed convulsively; dry
sobs they seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears.
XXVI. ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE
Zenobia had entirely forgotten me. She fancied herself alone with
her great grief. And had it been only a common pity that I felt for
her,--the pity that her proud nature would have repelled, as the one
worst wrong which the world yet held in reserve,--the sacredness and
awfulness of the crisis might have impelled me to steal away silently,
so that not a dry leaf should rustle under my feet. I would have
left her to struggle, in that solitude, with only the eye of God upon
her. But, so it happened, I never once dreamed of questioning my
right to be there now, as I had questioned it just before, when I
came so suddenly upon Hollingsworth and herself, in the passion of
their recent debate. It suits me not to explain what was the analogy
that I saw or imagined between Zenobia's situation and mine; nor, I
believe, will the reader detect this one secret, hidden beneath many
a revelation which perhaps concerned me less. In simple truth,
however, as Zenobia leaned her forehead against the rock, shaken with
that tearless agony, it seemed to me that the self-same pang, with
hardly mitigated torment, leaped thrilling from her heartstrings to
my own. Was it wrong, therefore, if I felt myself consecrated to the
priesthood by sympathy like this, and called upon to minister to this
woman's affliction, so far as mortal could?
But, indeed, what could mortal do for her? Nothing! The attempt
would be a mockery and an anguish. Time, it is true, would steal
away her grief, and bury it and the best of her heart in the same
grave. But Destiny itself, methought, in its kindliest mood, could
do no better for Zenobia, in the way of quick relief; than to cause
the impending rock to impend a little farther, and fall upon her head.
So I leaned against a tree, and listened to her sobs, in unbroken
silence. She was half prostrate, half kneeling, with her forehead
still pressed against the rock. Her sobs were the only sound; she
did not groan, nor give any other utterance to her distress. It was
all involuntary.
At length she sat up, put back her hair, and stared about her with a
bewildered aspect, as if not distinctly recollecting the scene
through which she had passed, nor cognizant of the situation in which
it left her. Her face and brow were almost purple with the rush of
blood. They whitened, however, by and by, and for some time retained
this deathlike hue. She put her hand to her forehead, with a gesture
that made me forcibly conscious of an intense and living pain there.
Her glance, wandering wildly to and fro, passed over me several times,
without appearing to inform her of my presence. But, finally, a
look of recognition gleamed from her eyes into mine.
"Is it you, Miles Coverdale?" said she, smiling. "Ah, I perceive
what you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad.
Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready."
"Oh, hush, Zenobia!" I answered. "Heaven knows what an ache is in
my soul!"
"It is genuine tragedy, is it not?" rejoined Zenobia, with a sharp,
light laugh. "And you are willing to allow, perhaps, that I have had
hard measure. But it is a woman's doom, and I have deserved it like
a woman; so let there be no pity, as, on my part, there shall be no
complaint. It is all right, now, or will shortly be so. But, Mr.
Coverdale, by all means write this ballad, and put your soul's ache
into it, and turn your sympathy to good account, as other poets do,
and as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering icicles
instead of lines of fire. As for the moral, it shall be distilled
into the final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey."
"What shall it be, Zenobia?" I inquired, endeavoring to fall in with
her mood.
"Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose," she replied. "There are
no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some. A
moral? Why, this: That, in the battlefield of life, the downright
stroke, that would fall only on a man's steel headpiece, is sure to
light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and
whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict. Or, this:
That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or
Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one
hair's-breadth out of the beaten track. Yes; and add (for I may as
well own it, now) that, with that one hair's-breadth, she goes all
astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards."
"This last is too stern a moral," I observed. "Cannot we soften it a
little?"
"Do it if you like, at your own peril, not on my responsibility," she
answered. Then, with a sudden change of subject, she went on: "After
all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the
poor, pale flower he kept. What can Priscilla do for him? Put
passionate warmth into his heart, when it shall be chilled with
frozen hopes? Strengthen his hands, when they are weary with much
doing and no performance? No! but only tend towards him with a blind,
instinctive love, and hang her
little, puny weakness for a clog upon his arm! She cannot even give
him such sympathy as is worth the name. For will he never, in many
an hour of darkness, need that proud intellectual sympathy which he
might have had from me?--the sympathy that would flash light along
his course, and guide, as well as cheer him? Poor Hollingsworth!
Where will he find it now?"
"Hollingsworth has a heart of ice!" said I bitterly. "He is a wretch!"
"Do him no wrong," interrupted Zenobia, turning haughtily upon me.
"Presume not to estimate a man like Hollingsworth. It was my fault,
all along, and none of his. I see it now! He never sought me. Why
should he seek me? What had I to offer him? A miserable, bruised,
and battered heart, spoilt long before he met me. A life, too,
hopelessly entangled with a villain's! He did well to cast me off.
God be praised, he did it! And yet, had he trusted me, and borne
with me a little longer, I would have saved him all this trouble."
She was silent for a time, and stood with her eyes fixed on the
ground. Again raising them, her look was more mild and calm.
"Miles Coverdale!" said she.
"Well, Zenobia," I responded. "Can I do you any service?"
"Very little," she replied. "But it is my purpose, as you may well
imagine, to remove from Blithedale; and, most likely, I may not see
Hollingsworth again. A woman in my position, you understand, feels
scarcely at her ease among former friends. New faces,--unaccustomed
looks,--those only can she tolerate. She would pine among familiar
scenes; she would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her
secret; her heart might throb uncomfortably; she would mortify
herself, I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the
honor of her sex at the foot of proud, contumacious man. Poor
womanhood, with its rights and wrongs! Here will be new matter for
my course of lectures, at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale,
a month or two ago. But, as you have really a heart and sympathies,
as far as they go, and as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth,
I must entreat you to be a messenger between him and me."
"Willingly," said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind
seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity. "What is
the message?"
"True,--what is it?" exclaimed Zenobia. "After all, I hardly know.
On better consideration, I have no message. Tell him,--tell him
something pretty and pathetic, that will come nicely and sweetly into
your ballad,--anything you please, so it be tender and submissive
enough. Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I'll haunt him!
"--She spoke these words with the wildest energy.--"And give him--no,
give Priscilla--this!"
Thus saying, she took the jewelled flower out of her hair; and it
struck me as the act of a queen, when worsted in a combat,
discrowning herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all
her pride.
"Bid her wear this for Zenobia's sake," she continued. "She is a
pretty little creature, and will make as soft and gentle a wife as
the veriest Bluebeard could desire. Pity that she must fade so soon!
These delicate and puny maidens always do. Ten years hence, let
Hollingsworth look at my face and Priscilla's, and then choose
betwixt them. Or, if he pleases, let him do it now."
How magnificently Zenobia looked as she said this! The effect of her
beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and
self-recognition of it, into which, I suppose, Hollingsworth's scorn
had driven her. She understood the look of admiration in my face;
and--Zenobia to the last--it gave her pleasure.
"It is an endless pity," said she, "that I had not bethought myself
of winning your heart, Mr. Coverdale, instead of Hollingsworth's. I
think I should have succeeded, and many women would have deemed you
the worthier conquest of the two. You are certainly much the
handsomest man. But there is a fate in these things. And beauty, in
a man, has been of little account with me since my earliest girlhood,
when, for once, it turned my head. Now, farewell!"
"Zenobia, whither are you going?" I asked.
"No matter where," said she. "But I am weary of this place, and sick
to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties
of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery
in our effort to establish the one true system. I have done with it;
and Blithedale must find another woman to superintend the laundry,
and you, Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel, the next
time you fall ill. It was, indeed, a foolish dream! Yet it gave us
some pleasant summer days, and bright hopes, while they lasted. It
can do no more; nor will it avail us to shed tears over a broken
bubble. Here is my hand! Adieu!"
She gave me her hand with the same free, whole-souled gesture as on
the first afternoon of our acquaintance, and, being greatly moved, I
bethought me of no better method of expressing my deep sympathy than
to carry it to my lips. In so doing, I perceived that this white
hand--so hospitably warm when I first touched it, five months
since--was now cold as a veritable piece of snow.
"How very cold!" I exclaimed, holding it between both my own, with
the vain idea of warming it. "What can be the reason? It is really
deathlike!"
"The extremities die first, they say," answered Zenobia, laughing.
"And so you kiss this poor, despised, rejected hand! Well, my dear
friend, I thank you. You have reserved your homage for the fallen.
Lip of man will never touch my hand again. I intend to become a
Catholic, for the sake of going into a nunnery. When you next hear
of Zenobia, her face will be behind the black veil; so look your last
at it now,--for all is over. Once more, farewell!"
She withdrew her hand, yet left a lingering pressure, which I felt
long afterwards. So intimately connected as I had been with perhaps
the only man in whom she was ever truly interested, Zenobia looked on
me as the representative of all the past, and was conscious that, in
bidding me adieu, she likewise took final leave of Hollingsworth, and
of this whole epoch of her life. Never did her beauty shine out more
lustrously than in the last glimpse that I had of her. She departed,
and was soon hidden among the trees. But, whether it was the strong
impression of the foregoing scene, or whatever else the cause, I was
affected with a fantasy that Zenobia had not actually gone, but was
still hovering about the spot and haunting it. I seemed to feel her
eyes upon me. It was as if the vivid coloring of her character had
left a brilliant stain upon the air. By degrees, however, the
impression grew less distinct. I flung myself upon the fallen leaves
at the base of Eliot's pulpit. The sunshine withdrew up the tree
trunks and flickered on the topmost boughs; gray twilight made the
wood obscure; the stars brightened out; the pendent boughs became wet
with chill autumnal dews. But I was listless, worn out with emotion
on my own behalf and sympathy for others, and had no heart to leave
my comfortless lair beneath the rock.
I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of
which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some
tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere
of slumber that enveloped them. Starting from the ground, I found
the risen moon shining upon the rugged face of the rock, and myself
all in a tremble.
XXVII. MIDNIGHT
It could not have been far from midnight when I came beneath
Hollingsworth's window, and, finding it open, flung in a tuft of
grass with earth at the roots, and heard it fall upon the floor. He
was either awake or sleeping very lightly; for scarcely a moment had
gone by before he looked out and discerned me standing in the
moonlight.
"Is it you, Coverdale?" he asked. "What is the matter?"
"Come down to me, Hollingsworth!" I answered. "I am anxious to
speak with you."
The strange tone of my own voice startled me, and him, probably, no
less. He lost no time, and soon issued from the house-door, with his
dress half arranged.
"Again, what is the matter?" he asked impatiently.
"Have you seen Zenobia," said I, "since you parted from her at
Eliot's pulpit?"
"No," answered Hollingsworth; "nor did I expect it."
His voice was deep, but had a tremor in it,
Hardly had he spoken, when Silas Foster thrust his head, done up in a
cotton handkerchief, out of another window, and took what he called
as it literally was--a squint at us.
"Well, folks, what are ye about here?" he demanded. "Aha! are you
there, Miles Coverdale? You have been turning night into day since
you left us, I reckon; and so you find it quite natural to come
prowling about the house at this time o' night, frightening my old
woman out of her wits, and making her disturb a tired man out of his
best nap. In with you, you vagabond, and to bed!"
"Dress yourself quickly, Foster," said I. "We want your assistance."
I could not, for the life of me, keep that strange tone out of my
voice. Silas Foster, obtuse as were his sensibilities, seemed to
feel the ghastly earnestness that was conveyed in it as well as
Hollingsworth did. He immediately withdrew his head, and I heard him
yawning, muttering to his wife, and again yawning heavily, while he
hurried on his clothes. Meanwhile I showed Hollingsworth a delicate
handkerchief, marked with a well-known cipher, and told where I had
found it, and other circumstances, which had filled me with a
suspicion so terrible that I left him, if he dared, to shape it out
for himself. By the time my brief explanation was finished, we were
joined by Silas Foster in his blue woollen frock.
"Well, boys," cried he peevishly, "what is to pay now?"
"Tell him, Hollingsworth," said I.
Hollingsworth shivered perceptibly, and drew in a hard breath betwixt
his teeth. He steadied himself, however, and, looking the matter
more firmly in the face than I had done, explained to Foster my
suspicions, and the grounds of them, with a distinctness from which,
in spite of my utmost efforts, my words had swerved aside. The
tough-nerved yeoman, in his comment, put a finish on the business,
and brought out the hideous idea in its full terror, as if he were
removing the napkin from the face of a corpse.
"And so you think she's drowned herself?" he cried. I turned away my
face.
"What on earth should the young woman do that for?" exclaimed Silas,
his eyes half out of his head with mere surprise. "Why, she has more
means than she can use or waste, and lacks nothing to make her
comfortable, but a husband, and that's an article she could have, any
day. There's some mistake about this, I tell you!"
"Come," said I, shuddering; "let us go and ascertain the truth."
"Well, well," answered Silas Foster; "just as you say. We'll take
the long pole, with the hook at the end, that serves to get the
bucket out of the draw-well when the rope is broken. With that, and
a couple of long-handled hay-rakes, I'll answer for finding her, if
she's anywhere to be found. Strange enough! Zenobia drown herself!
No, no; I don't believe it. She had too much sense, and too much
means, and enjoyed life a great deal too well."
When our few preparations were completed, we hastened, by a shorter
than the customary route, through fields and pastures, and across a
portion of the meadow, to the particular spot on the river-bank which
I had paused to contemplate in the course of my afternoon's ramble.
A nameless presentiment had again drawn me thither, after leaving
Eliot's pulpit. I showed my companions where I had found the
handkerchief, and pointed to two or three footsteps, impressed into
the clayey margin, and tending towards the water. Beneath its
shallow verge, among the water-weeds, there were further traces, as
yet unobliterated by the sluggish current, which was there almost at
a standstill. Silas Foster thrust his face down close to these
footsteps, and picked up a shoe that had escaped my observation,
being half imbedded in the mud.
"There's a kid shoe that never was made on a Yankee last," observed
he. "I know enough of shoemaker's craft to tell that. French
manufacture; and see what a high instep! and how evenly she trod in
it! There never was a woman that stept handsomer in her shoes than
Zenobia did. Here," he added, addressing Hollingsworth, "would you
like to keep the shoe?"
Hollingsworth started back.
"Give it to me, Foster," said I.
I dabbled it in the water, to rinse off the mud, and have kept it
ever since. Not far from this spot lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up
on the oozy river-side, and generally half full of water. It served
the angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up
his wild ducks. Setting this crazy bark afloat, I seated myself in
the stern with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows with
the hooked pole, and Silas Foster amidships with a hay-rake.
"It puts me in mind of my young days," remarked Silas, "when I used
to steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels. Heigh-ho!--
well, life and death together make sad work for us all! Then I was
a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old fellow,
and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads; if I
thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind
o' sorrowful."
"I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue," muttered I.
The moon, that night, though past the full, was still large and oval,
and having risen between eight and nine o'clock, now shone aslantwise
over the river, throwing the high, opposite bank, with its woods,
into deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually.
Not a ray appeared to fall on the river itself. It lapsed
imperceptibly away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its
own secrets from the eye of man, as impenetrably as mid-ocean could.
"Well, Miles Coverdale," said Foster, "you are the helmsman. How do
you mean to manage this business?"
"I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past that stump," I
replied. "I know the bottom, having sounded it in fishing. The
shore, on this side, after the first step or two, goes off very
abruptly; and there is a pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen
feet deep. The current could not have force enough to sweep any
sunken object, even if partially buoyant, out of that hollow."
"Come, then," said Silas; "but I doubt whether I can touch bottom
with this hay-rake, if it's as deep as you say. Mr. Hollingsworth, I
think you'll be the lucky man to-night, such luck as it is."
We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his rake manfully,
poking it as far as he could into the water, and immersing the whole
length of his arm besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless,
with the hooked pole elevated in the air. But, by and by, with a
nervous and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness
that upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts,
methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy. I bent over the
side of the boat. So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was
that dark stream, that--and the thought made me shiver like a leaf--I
might as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world,
to discover what had become of Zenobia's soul, as into the river's
depths, to find her body. And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face
upward, while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering
downward, passed slowly betwixt her and the sky!
Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat upstream, and again suffered
it to glide, with the river's slow, funereal motion, downward. Silas
Foster had raked up a large mass of stuff, which, as it came towards
the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be
a monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth, with a gigantic
effort, upheaved a sunken log. When once free of the bottom, it rose
partly out of water,--all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object,
which the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years,--then
plunged again, and sullenly returned to its old resting-place, for
the remnant of the century.
"That looked ugly!" quoth Silas. "I half thought it was the Evil One,
on the same errand as ourselves,--searching for Zenobia."
"He shall never get her," said I, giving the boat a strong impulse.
"That's not for you to say, my boy," retorted the yeoman. "Pray God
he never has, and never may. Slow work this, however! I should
really be glad to find something! Pshaw! What a notion that is,
when the only good luck would be to paddle, and drift, and poke, and
grope, hereabouts, till morning, and have our labor for our pains!
For my part, I shouldn't wonder if the creature had only lost her
shoe in the mud, and saved her soul alive, after all. My stars! how
she will laugh at us, to-morrow morning!"
It is indescribable what an image of Zenobia--at the breakfast-table,
full of warm and mirthful life--this surmise of Silas Foster's
brought before my mind. The terrible phantasm of her death was
thrown by it into the remotest and dimmest background, where it
seemed to grow as improbable as a myth.
"Yes, Silas, it may be as you say," cried I. The drift of the stream
had again borne us a little below the stump, when I felt--yes, felt,
for it was as if the iron hook had smote my breast--felt
Hollingsworth's pole strike some object at the bottom of the river!
He started up, and almost overset the boat.
"Hold on!" cried Foster; "you have her!"
Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth heaved
amain, and up came a white swash to the surface of the river. It was
the flow of a woman's garments. A little higher, and we saw her dark
hair streaming down the current. Black River of Death, thou hadst
yielded up thy victim! Zenobia was found!
Silas Foster laid hold of the body; Hollingsworth likewise grappled
with it; and I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at
Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat's
side. Arriving near the shore, we all three stept into the water,
bore her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree.
"Poor child!" said Foster,--and his dry old heart, I verily believe,
vouchsafed a tear, "I'm sorry for her!"
Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader
might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than
twelve long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now
reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all
modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed
limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the marble image of a
death-agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and
were bent before her with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent,
and--thank God for it!--in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity!
It is impossible to bear the terror of it. It seemed,--I must
needs impart so much of my own miserable idea,--it seemed as if her
body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton
would keep it in the grave; and that when Zenobia rose at the day of
judgment, it would be in just the same attitude as now!
One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear. She knelt
as if in prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul,
bubbling out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the
Father, reconciled and penitent. But her arms! They were bent
before her, as if she struggled against Providence in never-ending
hostility. Her hands! They were clenched in immitigable defiance.
Away with the hideous thought. The flitting moment after Zenobia
sank into the dark pool--when her breath was gone, and her soul at
her lips was as long, in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness,
as the lifetime of the world!
Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.
"You have wounded the poor thing's breast," said he to Hollingsworth,
"close by her heart, too!"
"Ha!" cried Hollingsworth with a start.
And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!
"See!" said Foster. "That's the place where the iron struck her. It
looks cruelly, but she never felt it!"
He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side.
His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down;
and rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly
as before. He made another effort, with the same result.
"In God's name, Silas Foster," cried I with bitter indignation. "let
that dead woman alone!"
"Why, man, it's not decent!" answered he, staring at me in amazement.
"I can't bear to see her looking so! Well, well," added he, after a
third effort, "'tis of no use, sure enough; and we must leave the
women to do their best with her, after we get to the house. The
sooner that's done, the better."
We took two rails from a neighboring fence, and formed a bier by
laying across some boards from the bottom of the boat. And thus we
bore Zenobia homeward. Six hours before, how beautiful! At midnight,
what a horror! A reflection occurs to me that will show ludicrously,
I doubt not, on my page, but must come in for its sterling truth.
Being the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these
ugly circumstances of death,--how ill it would become her, the
altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old
Silas Foster's efforts to improve the matter,--she would no more have
committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public
assembly in a badly fitting garment! Zenobia, I have often thought,
was not quite simple in her death. She had seen pictures, I suppose,
of drowned persons in lithe and graceful attitudes. And she deemed
it well and decorous to die as so many village maidens have, wronged
in their first love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old
familiar stream,--so familiar that they could not dread it,--where,
in childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg
deep, unmindful of wet skirts. But in Zenobia's case there was some
tint of the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all
our lives for a few months past.
This, however, to my conception, takes nothing from the tragedy. For,
has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after
a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put
ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity? Slowly, slowly, with
many a dreary pause,--resting the bier often on some rock or
balancing it across a mossy log, to take fresh hold,--we bore our
burden onward through the moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia on the
floor of the old farmhouse. By and by came three or four withered
women and stood whispering around the corpse, peering at it through
their spectacles, holding up their skinny hands, shaking their
night-capped heads, and taking counsel of one another's experience
what was to be done.
With those tire-women we left Zenobia.
XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE
Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity
of a burial-ground. There was some consultation among us in what
spot Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she
should sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged
front of the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--
and not another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss
and lichens to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to
whose ideas on this point great deference was due) made it his
request that her grave might be dug on the gently sloping hillside,
in the wide pasture, where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had
planned to build their cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.
She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of
years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists
had sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony,
which should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith
and eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those
customary rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom,
and by long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than
their first death-smell in them. But when the occasion came we found
it the simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves
with the old fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no
novelties, and particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and
cheerful emblems. The procession moved from the farmhouse. Nearest
the dead walked an old man in deep mourning, his face mostly
concealed in a white handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his
arm. Hollingsworth and myself came next. We all stood around the
narrow niche in the cold earth; all saw the coffin lowered in; all
heard the rattle of the crumbly soil upon its lid,--that final sound,
which mortality awakens on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the
vain hope of bringing an echo from the spiritual world.
I noticed a stranger,--a stranger to most of those present, though
known to me,--who, after the coffin had descended, took up a handful
of earth and flung it first into the grave. I had given up
Hollingsworth's arm, and now found myself near this man.
"It was an idle thing--a foolish thing--for Zenobia to do," said he.
"She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been
necessary. It was too absurd! I have no patience with her."
"Why so?" I inquired, smothering my horror at his cold comment, in
my eager curiosity to discover some tangible truth as to his relation
with Zenobia. "If any crisis could justify the sad wrong she offered
to herself, it was surely that in which she stood. Everything had
failed her; prosperity in the world's sense, for her opulence was
gone,--the heart's prosperity, in love. And there was a secret
burden on her, the nature of which is best known to you. Young as
she was, she had tried life fully, had no more to hope, and something,
perhaps, to fear. Had Providence taken her away in its own holy
hand, I should have thought it the kindest dispensation that could be
awarded to one so wrecked."
"You mistake the matter completely," rejoined Westervelt.
"What, then, is your own view of it?" I asked.
"Her mind was active, and various in its powers," said he. "Her
heart had a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite
buoyancy, which (had she possessed only a little patience to await
the reflux of her troubles) would have borne her upward triumphantly
for twenty years to come. Her beauty would not have waned--or
scarcely so, and surely not beyond the reach of art to restore it--in
all that time. She had life's summer all before her, and a hundred
varieties of brilliant success. What an actress Zenobia might have
been! It was one of her least valuable capabilities. How forcibly
she might have wrought upon the world, either directly in her own
person, or by her influence upon some man, or a series of men, of
controlling genius! Every prize that could be worth a woman's
having--and many prizes which other women are too timid to
desire--lay within Zenobia's reach."
"In all this," I observed, "there would have been nothing to satisfy
her heart."
"Her heart!" answered Westervelt contemptuously. "That troublesome
organ (as she had hitherto found it) would have been kept in its due
place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly
claim. She would soon have established a control over it. Love had
failed her, you say. Had it never failed her before? Yet she
survived it, and loved again,--possibly not once alone, nor twice
either. And now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philanthropist!"
"Who are you," I exclaimed indignantly, "that dare to speak thus of
the dead? You seem to intend a eulogy, yet leave out whatever was
noblest in her, and blacken while you mean to praise. I have long
considered you as Zenobia's evil fate. Your sentiments confirm me in
the idea, but leave me still ignorant as to the mode in which you
have influenced her life. The connection may have been indissoluble,
except by death. Then, indeed,--always in the hope of God's infinite
mercy,--I cannot deem it a misfortune that she sleeps in yonder grave!"
"No matter what I was to her," he answered gloomily, yet without
actual emotion. "She is now beyond my reach. Had she lived, and
hearkened to my counsels, we might have served each other well. But
there Zenobia lies in yonder pit, with the dull earth over her.
Twenty years of a brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman's
whim!"
Heaven deal with Westervelt according to his nature and deserts!--
that is to say, annihilate him. He was altogether earthy, worldly,
made for time and its gross objects, and incapable--except by a sort
of dim reflection caught from other minds--of so much as one
spiritual idea. Whatever stain Zenobia had was caught from him; nor
does it seldom happen that a character of admirable qualities loses
its better life because the atmosphere that should sustain it is
rendered poisonous by such breath as this man mingled with Zenobia's.
Yet his reflections possessed their share of truth. It was a woeful
thought, that a woman of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have
fancied herself irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of
life, and with no refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely
because Love had gone against her. It is nonsense, and a miserable
wrong,--the result, like so many others, of masculine egotism,--that
the success or failure of woman's existence should be made to depend
wholly on the affections, and on one species of affection, while man
has such a multitude of other chances, that this seems but an
incident. For its own sake, if it will do no more, the world should
throw open all its avenues to the passport of a woman's bleeding
heart.
As we stood around the grave, I looked often towards Priscilla,
dreading to see her wholly overcome with grief. And deeply grieved,
in truth, she was. But a character so simply constituted as hers has
room only for a single predominant affection. No other feeling can
touch the heart's inmost core, nor do it any deadly mischief. Thus,
while we see that such a being responds to every breeze with
tremulous vibration, and imagine that she must be shattered by the
first rude blast, we find her retaining her equilibrium amid shocks
that might have overthrown many a sturdier frame. So with Priscilla;
her one possible misfortune was Hollingsworth's unkindness; and that
was destined never to befall her, never yet, at least, for Priscilla
has not died.
But Hollingsworth! After all the evil that he did, are we to leave
him thus, blest with the entire devotion of this one true heart, and
with wealth at his disposal to execute the long-contemplated project
that had led him so far astray? What retribution is there here? My
mind being vexed with precisely this query, I made a journey, some
years since, for the sole purpose of catching a last glimpse of
Hollingsworth, and judging for myself whether he were a happy man or
no. I learned that he inhabited a small cottage, that his way of
life was exceedingly retired, and that my only chance of encountering
him or Priscilla was to meet them in a secluded lane, where, in the
latter part of the afternoon, they were accustomed to walk. I did
meet them, accordingly. As they approached me, I observed in
Hollingsworth's face a depressed and melancholy look, that seemed
habitual; the powerfully built man showed a self-distrustful weakness,
and a childlike or childish tendency to press close, and closer
still, to the side of the slender woman whose arm was within his. In
Priscilla's manner there was a protective and watchful quality, as if
she felt herself the guardian of her companion; but, likewise, a deep,
submissive, unquestioning reverence, and also a veiled happiness in
her fair and quiet countenance.
Drawing nearer, Priscilla recognized me, and gave me a kind and
friendly smile, but with a slight gesture, which I could not help
interpreting as an entreaty not to make myself known to Hollingsworth.
Nevertheless, an impulse took possession of me, and compelled me to
address him.
"I have come, Hollingsworth," said I, "to view your grand edifice for
the reformation of criminals. Is it finished yet?"
"No, nor begun," answered he, without raising his eyes. "A very
small one answers all my purposes."
Priscilla threw me an upbraiding glance. But I spoke again, with a
bitter and revengeful emotion, as if flinging a poisoned arrow at
Hollingsworth's heart.
"Up to this moment," I inquired, "how many criminals have you
reformed?"
"Not one," said Hollingsworth, with his eyes still fixed on the
ground. "Ever since we parted, I have been busy with a single
murderer."
Then the tears gushed into my eyes, and I forgave him; for I
remembered the wild energy, the passionate shriek, with which Zenobia
had spoken those words, "Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that
I'll haunt him!"--and I knew what murderer he meant, and whose
vindictive shadow dogged the side where Priscilla was not.
The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from
Hollingsworth's character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting
what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be
often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is
perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive
channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the
heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed
violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural
process, but should render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent,
and insensibly influence other hearts and other lives to the same
blessed end. I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most
awful truth in Bunyan's book of such, from the very gate of heaven
there is a by-way to the pit!
But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia's grave. I
have never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew
all the better, on that little parallelogram of pasture land, for the
decay of the beautiful woman who slept beneath. How Nature seems to
love us! And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a
complaint, she converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest
one--that of a conscious intellectual life and sensibility has been
untimely balked! While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and
directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest
handiwork. Zenobia perished. Will not Nature shed a tear? Ah, no!--
she adopts the calamity at once into her system, and is just as
well pleased, for aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker
vegetation that grew out of Zenobia's heart, as with all the beauty
which has bequeathed us no earthly representative except in this crop
of weeds. It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless
body is so little valued.
XXIX. MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION
It remains only to say a few words about myself. Not improbably, the
reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but
a poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate
interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other
lives. But one still retains some little consideration for one's
self; so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and
sole behoof.
But what, after all, have I to tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing! I
left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back
thither no more. The whole soil of our farm, for a long time
afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave. I could not
toil there, nor live upon its products. Often, however, in these
years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme
of a noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer,
appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be
perfected, as the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a
world! Were my former associates now there,--were there only three
or four of those true-hearted men still laboring in the sun,--I
sometimes fancy that I should direct my world-weary footsteps
thitherward, and entreat them to receive me, for old friendship's
sake. More and more I feel that we had struck upon what ought to be
a truth. Posterity may dig it up, and profit by it. The experiment,
so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a
failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well
deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where once
we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town paupers, aged,
nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what
faith is requisite to bear up against such results of generous effort!
My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at
all events, tolerably enough. I am now at middle age, well, well, a
step or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows
it!--a bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise.
I have been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather
agreeably at each visit. Being well to do in the world, and having
nobody but myself to care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare
sumptuously every day. As for poetry, I have given it up,
notwithstanding that Dr. Griswold--as the reader, of course,
knows--has placed me at a fair elevation among our minor minstrelsy,
on the strength of my pretty little volume, published ten years ago.
As regards human progress (in spite of my irrepressible yearnings
over the Blithedale reminiscences), let them believe in it who can,
and aid in it who choose. If I could earnestly do either, it might
be all the better for my comfort. As Hollingsworth once told me, I
lack a purpose. How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an overplus
of the very same ingredient, the want of which, I occasionally
suspect, has rendered my own life all an emptiness. I by no means
wish to die. Yet, were there any cause, in this whole chaos of human
struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and which my death would
benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did not involve an
unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold to offer up
my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battlefield of
Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild,
sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale
would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled
bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.
I exaggerate my own defects. The reader must not take my own word
for it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once
hoped strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss. Frostier heads
than mine have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have
imbibed new warmth, and been newly happy. Life, however, it must be
owned, has come to rather an idle pass with me. Would my friends
like to know what brought it thither? There is one secret,--I have
concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of
it escape,--one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had
something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with
my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on
life, and my listless glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it?
It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world,
moreover, with these three white hairs in his brown mustache and
that deepening track of a crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd
thing ever to have happened, and quite the absurdest for an old
bachelor, like me, to talk about. But it rises to my throat; so let
it come.
I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will
throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing
incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my
story. The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is
entitled to this one word more. As I write it, he will charitably
suppose me to blush, and turn away my face:
I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of "The Blithedale Romance" by
Nathaniel Hawthorne