The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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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, "'t is 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!
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