The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an
undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.
"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she in
the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It is a
grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the
startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight
Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the stroke
of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold water and
give me my death with a pair of wet slippers! And when the verses are
written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you with my idea
as to what the girl really is."
"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."
"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress from
the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose than to do
my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly expect to make my
dresses."
"How can you decide upon her so easily?" I inquired.
"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness of
masculine perceptions!" said Zenobia. "There is no proof which you
would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip of her
forefinger. Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her paleness, her
nervousness, and her wretched fragility. Poor thing! She has been
stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small, close room, and
has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins, candy, and all such
trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so, as she has hardly any
physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may be allowed to think her
spiritual."
"Look at her now!" whispered I.
Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her wan
face and great tears running down her cheeks. It was difficult to resist
the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our voices, she must
have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's scornful estimate of her
character and purposes.
"What ears the girl must have!" whispered Zenobia, with a look of
vexation, partly comic and partly real. "I will confess to you that I
cannot quite make her out. However, I am positively not an ill-natured
person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you, and especially
Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd creature, and as she
knocks with a very slight tap against my own heart likewise,--why, I mean
to let her in. From this moment I will be reasonably kind to her. There
is no pleasure in tormenting a person of one's own sex, even if she do
favor one with a little more love than one can conveniently dispose of;
and that, let me say, Mr. Coverdale, is the most troublesome offence you
can offer to a woman."
"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."
She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy
finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.
The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up
beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla had
been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her place.
This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently
received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from her, whatever
the unuttered boon might be. From that instant, too, she melted in
quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element. Though always
an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme of frequent
discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth fixed. We no more
thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had been recognized as a
domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic fireside of old, before we
had ever been warmed by its blaze.
She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little
wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded to
knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk purse.
As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses before;
indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their peculiar excellence, besides
the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the almost
impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the aperture;
although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as charity or
prodigality might wish. I wondered if it were not a symbol of Priscilla's
own mystery.
Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,
our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the strong puffs
of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken frame
of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to inquire
whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some unusual mischief
in the shrieking blast. She had been bred up, no doubt, in some close
nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the city, where the
uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter down the slates of
the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the casement of her
little room. The sense of vast, undefined space, pressing from the
outside against the black panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful
to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits,
with the lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street.
The house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night.
A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of
nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its
limitless extent. Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught hold
of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of one who hears her own name
spoken at a distance, but is unutterably reluctant to obey the call.
We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly said a
word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then, indeed,
he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations like a
tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and betake
himself back into the solitude of his heart and mind. The poor fellow
had contracted this ungracious habit from the intensity with which he
contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent sympathy which they met
with from his auditors,--a circumstance that seemed only to strengthen
the implicit confidence that he awarded to them. His heart, I imagine,
was never really interested in our socialist scheme, but was forever busy
with his strange, and, as most people thought it, impracticable plan, for
the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts.
Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him on
this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject
by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the
condition of his higher instincts afterwards.
The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our infant
community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more difficulty
than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was neither good
nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of the premises, had
it possessed the oil-and--honey flow which the aborigines were so often
happy in communicating to their local appellations; but it chanced to be
a harsh, ill-connected, and interminable word, which seemed to fill the
mouth with a mixture of very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles.
Zenobia suggested "Sunny Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better
system of society. This we turned over and over for a while,
acknowledging its prettiness, but concluded it to be rather too fine and
sentimental a name (a fault inevitable by literary ladies in such
attempts) for sunburnt men to work under. I ventured to whisper "Utopia,"
which, however, was unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very
harshly maltreated, as if he had intended a latent satire. Some were for
calling our institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one green
spot in the moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted on a
proviso for reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end, when a final
decision might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or "Sahara." So,
at last, finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we
resolved that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good
augury enough.
The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through the
windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence, close
beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the
prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By and by the door was opened by
Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow
candle in his hand.
"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,
bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can. I shall sound the
horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to
milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."
Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my
fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been
growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous
cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit subject
for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one. During the greater
part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea remains in
the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable other ideas
go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant transition with
intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that night's half-waking
dreams, it is my belief that it would have anticipated several of the
chief incidents of this narrative, including a dim shadow of its
catastrophe. Starting up in bed at length, I saw that the storm was past,
and the moon was shining on the snowy landscape, which looked like a
lifeless copy of the world in marble.
From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the moonlight,
came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven swiftly by the
wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing amid tufts of
leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side, until it swept across
our doorstep.
How cold an Arcadia was this!
VI. COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER
The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us, harsh,
uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as if this
hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.
On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the brethren
of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves into their
habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin the reformation
of the world. Zenobia put her head into the entry, and besought Silas
Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough to leave an armful of
firewood and a pail of water at her chamber door. Of the whole household,
--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla, for whose habits, in this particular,
I cannot vouch,--of all our apostolic society, whose mission was to
bless mankind, Hollingsworth, I apprehend, was the only one who began the
enterprise with prayer. My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned
from his, the solemn murmur of his voice made its way to my ears,
compelling me to be an auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator. It
affected me with a deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity
then existing, or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor
my subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits
(except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked
out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine
interview from which he passes into his daily life.
As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward, cursing
my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was, the hot-house
warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I indulged
myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system; and the
wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general chill of our
airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the marrow of my
bones. In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish as it may
appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a
century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my
intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.
What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society
than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant
bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the
bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals;
my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of my own
contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture gallery; my
noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession
of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which I shared; my
dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at command, and could
banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott when the Devil fed him
from the king of France's kitchen; my evening at the billiard club, the
concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could
be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil
amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke
of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of
my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth,
into whose vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to
have a fever and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?
In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into the
icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time, when
Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.
"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!
Don't you mean to get up to-day?"
"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I ever
rise again!"
"What is the matter now?" he asked.
I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in a
close carriage.
"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."
Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to do
while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A
doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,
in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the
point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a
skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many precious
recollections connected with that fit of sickness.
Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of
the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile
feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind
causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our selfish existence.
The education of Christianity, it is true, the sympathy of a like
experience and the example of women, may soften and, possibly, subvert
this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is originally there, and has
likewise its analogy in the practice of our brute brethren, who hunt the
sick or disabled member of the herd from among them, as an enemy. It is
for this reason that the stricken deer goes apart, and the sick lion
grimly withdraws himself into his den. Except in love, or the
attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we
really have no tenderness. But there was something of the woman moulded
into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it,
as men often are of what is best in them, nor seemed ever to know that
there was such a soft place in his heart. I knew it well, however, at
that time, although afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten. Methought
there could not be two such men alive as Hollingsworth. There never was
any blaze of a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings
and shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those
eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.
Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!
and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably
there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone. How many
men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose for
his deathbed companions! At the crisis of my fever I besought
Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to make
me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the hand, a word, a prayer,
if he thought good to utter it; and that then he should be the witness
how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still impresses me as
almost a matter of regret that I did not die then, when I had tolerably
made up my mind to it; for Hollingsworth would have gone with me to the
hither verge of life, and have sent his friendly and hopeful accents far
over on the other side, while I should be treading the unknown path. Now,
were I to send for him, he would hardly come to my bedside, nor should I
depart the easier for his presence.
"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling. "You
know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal more
desperate than it is."
"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a little
of my customary levity.
"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you fancy
yourself so ready to leave it?"
"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty
verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs, in
our pastoral. It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as viewed
through a mist of fever. But, dear Hollingsworth, your own vocation is
evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and nights in helping
your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying breaths."
"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me fitted
for this awful ministry?"
"By your tenderness," I said. " It seems to me the reflection of God's
own love."
"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully. "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."
"I do not believe it," I replied.
But, in due time, I remembered what he said.
Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so serious as,
in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to consider it. After
so much tragical preparation, it was positively rather mortifying to find
myself on the mending hand.
All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to
the full measure of their capacity. Zenobia brought me my gruel every
day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be
told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my
bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous
throbs to my pulse. Her poor little stories and tracts never half did
justice to her intellect. It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that
drove her to seek development in literature. She was made (among a
thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress. I
recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds. It
startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily
faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy. She made
no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as
with a breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks upon
society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined
to aim directly at that spot. Especially the relation between the sexes
is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.
Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her dress
could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence.
The image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the
earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her as the
spectacle of only a few. The stage would have been her proper sphere.
She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit endlessly to
painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter; because the cold
decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost scantiness of drapery,
so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with her material perfection
in its entireness. I know not well how to express that the native glow
of coloring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms,
and what was visible of her full bust,--in a word, her womanliness
incarnated,--compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not
quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion,
no doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.
I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always a
new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be fervid
and spicy. Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to the
preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich beauty of
the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn; so fit,
indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a happy
exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia's head. It
might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves about this
peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and wonderful than if
beheld with temperate eyes. In the height of my illness, as I well
recollect, I went so far as to pronounce it preternatural.
"Zenobia is an enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth. "She is
a sister of the Veiled Lady. That flower in her hair is a talisman. If
you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be transformed into
something else." "What does he say?" asked Zenobia.
"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth. "He
is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being a witch,
and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in your hair."
"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather
compassionately, and taking out the flower. "I scorn to owe anything to
magic. Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it has any
virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a new one
to-morrow. It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my happier days!"
The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight
delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as t continued to know this
remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination, though more
slightly, yet in very much the same way. The reason must have been that,
whether intentionally on her part or not, this favorite ornament was
actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's character.
One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed
myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever been
married. The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by any
circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears. So young as
I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a thousand, there was
certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny already accomplished; the
probability was far greater that her coming years had all life's richest
gifts to bring. If the great event of a woman's existence had been
consummated, the world knew nothing of it, although the world seemed to
know Zenobia well. It was a ridiculous piece of romance, undoubtedly, to
imagine that this beautiful personage, wealthy as she was, and holding a
position that might fairly enough be called distinguished, could have
given herself away so privately, but that some whisper and suspicion, and
by degrees a full understanding of the fact, would eventually be blown
abroad. But then, as I failed not to consider, her original home was at
a distance of many hundred miles. Rumors might fill the social
atmosphere, or might once have filled it, there, which would travel but
slowly, against the wind, towards our Northeastern metropolis, and
perhaps melt into thin air before reaching it.
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