A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>	S	>>	T	>>	U
V	>>	W	>>			X	>>	Z

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Reineke Fuchs"

Charles Dickens - "Dombey and Son"

Henry James - "Pandora"

Edith Wharton - "House of Mirth"

The Blithedale Romance

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance



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 redtipt 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.

Copyright (c) 2007. fullstories.net. All rights reserved.