The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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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 whitepine 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!"
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