The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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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 wellbeing,
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.
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