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_ May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia’s sole decree, or by the
unanimous vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival.
It was deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to
clear away the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring
out a few of the readiest wild flowers. On the forenoon of the
substituted day, after admitting some of the balmy air into my
chamber, I decided that it was nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself
a prisoner any longer. So I descended to the sitting-room, and
finding nobody there, proceeded to the barn, whence I had already
heard Zenobia's voice, and along with it a girlish laugh which was
not so certainly recognizable. Arriving at the spot, it a little
surprised me to discover that these merry outbreaks came from
Priscilla.
The two had been a-maying together. They had found anemones in
abundance, houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few
long-stalked violets, and a quantity of white everlasting flowers,
and had filled up their basket with the delicate spray of shrubs and
trees. None were prettier than the maple twigs, the leaf of which
looks like a scarlet bud in May, and like a plate of vegetable gold
in October. Zenobia, who showed no conscience in such matters, had
also rifled a cherry-tree of one of its blossomed boughs, and, with
all this variety of sylvan ornament, had been decking out Priscilla.
Being done with a good deal of taste, it made her look more charming
than I should have thought possible, with my recollection of the wan,
frost-nipt girl, as heretofore described. Nevertheless, among those
fragrant blossoms, and conspicuously, too, had been stuck a weed of
evil odor and ugly aspect, which, as soon as I detected it, destroyed
the effect of all the rest. There was a gleam of latent
mischief--not to call it deviltry--in Zenobia's eye, which seemed to
indicate a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement.
As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore
nothing but her invariable flower of the tropics.
"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?" asked she,
surveying her as a child does its doll. "Is not she worth a verse or
two?"
"There is only one thing amiss," answered I. Zenobia laughed, and
flung the malignant weed away.
"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet
than myself. She is the very picture of the New England spring;
subdued in tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and
bringing us a few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer,
though hardly more beautiful, hereafter. The best type of her is one
of those anemones."
"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"
observed Zenobia, "is her wildness. Such a quiet little body as she
seemed, one would not have expected that. Why, as we strolled the
woods together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees,
like a squirrel. She has never before known what it is to live in
the free air, and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine.
And she thinks it such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly
Mr. Hollingsworth and myself, such angels! It is quite ridiculous,
and provokes one's malice almost, to see a creature so happy,
especially a feminine creature."
"They are always happier than male creatures," said I.
"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia
contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight. Did
you ever see a happy woman in your life? Of course, I do not mean a
girl, like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike,
while on the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman. How can
she be happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one
single event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her
whole life? A man has his choice of innumerable events."
"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one
event, may compensate for the lack of variety."
"Indeed!" said Zenobia.
While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a
distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder,
returning from the field. She immediately set out to meet him,
running and skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May
morning, but with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive;
she clapped her hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is
the custom of young girls when their electricity overcharges them.
But, all at once, midway to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round
about her, towards the river, the road, the woods, and back towards
us, appearing to listen, as if she heard some one calling her name,
and knew not precisely in what direction.
"Have you bewitched her?" I exclaimed.
"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl
do that identical thing once or twice before. Can you imagine what
is the matter with her?"
"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy
tongues that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."
From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have
deserted her. She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until
Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to
us, she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless
Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago. These
sudden transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme
nervous susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl,
though with diminished frequency as her health progressively grew
more robust.
I was now on my legs again. My fit of illness had been an avenue
between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through
which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and
knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that
lay beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death,
too, it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have
rid myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and
other such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along
the broad highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time,
however freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy
morning. The very substance upon my bones had not been fit to live
with in any better, truer, or more energetic mode than that to which
I was accustomed. So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any
other worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little
while in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more
satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and physical
truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the
exultation with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its
eternal progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in
an early grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as
now affected me for the flesh which I had lost.
Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of
the brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions.
Their enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which
they sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the
material
world and its climate. In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and
stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,
blossoming with many-colored delights. Thus Nature, whose laws I
had broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me
as a strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy
for his naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some
pretty playthings to console the urchin for her severity.
In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits
to our little army of saints and martyrs. They were mostly
individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust
them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had
suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come.
On comparing their minds one with another they often discovered
that this idea of a Community had been growing up, in silent and
unknown sympathy, for years. Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were
among them; sombre brows, but eyes that did not require spectacles,
unless prematurely dimmed by the student's lamplight, and hair that
seldom showed a thread of silver. Age, wedded to the past, incrusted
over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its
possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise
like this. Youth, too, in its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to
our purpose; for it would behold the morning radiance of its own
spirit beaming over the very same spots of withered grass and barren
sand whence most of us had seen it vanish. We had very young people
with us, it is true,--downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens,
and children of all heights above one's knee; but these had chiefly
been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and
methods of our institution to supply. Then we had boarders, from
town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized
more or less in our theories, and sometimes shared in our labors.
On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,
perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long.
Persons of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might
be called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot. But,
so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling,
with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near without
finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward.
We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on
every imaginable subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not
affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or
another to quarrel with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed
as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any
further. As to what should be substituted, there was much less
unanimity. We did not greatly care--at least, I never did--for the
written constitution under which our millennium had commenced. My
hope was, that, between theory and practice, a true and available
mode of life might be struck out; and that, even should we ultimately
fail, the months or years spent in the trial would not have been
wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience which
makes men wise.
Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers
fastened with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people
of poetry and the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we
looked rather like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a
company of honest laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers.
Whatever might be our points of difference, we all of us seemed to
have come to Blithedale with the one thrifty and laudable idea of
wearing out our old clothes. Such garments as had an airing,
whenever we strode afield! Coats with high collars and with no
collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with the waist at every
point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons of a dozen successive
epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the
wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a living epitome of
defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment of men who had
seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often retaining a
scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens
of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by
agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their
cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows,
and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn
comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted
in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have
served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the
matter was, that the first energetic movement essential to one
downright stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor
habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to
honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to
the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus,
"--which as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would
be apt to astonish the women-folks.
After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us.
Our faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and
our shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked
as if they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe,
the scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen
responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at
daybreak with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was
usually quite gone by breakfast-time.
To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They
told slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or
to drive them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from
their conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too,
that the cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and
invariably kicked over the pails; partly in consequence of our
putting the stool on the wrong side, and partly because, taking
offence at the whisking of their tails, we were in the habit of
holding these natural fly-flappers with one hand and milking with the
other. They further averred that we hoed up whole acres of Indian
corn and other crops, and drew the earth carefully about the weeds;
and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for
cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful planting few of our seeds
ever came up at all, or, if they did come up, it was stern-foremost;
and that we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a
field of beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this
unseemly way. They quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary
occurrence for one or other of us to crop off two or three fingers,
of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter. Finally, and as
an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues circulated a report
that we communitarians were exterminated, to the last man, by
severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own scythes! and
that the world had lost nothing by this little accident.
But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring
farmers. The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should
fail in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should
probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in
theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the
spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and
ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some
aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in
the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we
were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of
truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well
as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually
around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer
picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at
such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature,
as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no
opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which
she mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. The
clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and
over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the
contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing,
and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening.
Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily
exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of
finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and
integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or
welded into one substance.
Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as
Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.
"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the
hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."
"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.
"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."
"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?"
asked Zenobia. "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any
better than Burns did. Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an
individual you are to be, two or three years hence. Grim Silas
Foster is your prototype, with his palm of sole-leather, and his
joints of rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of
what he calls his winter's rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't
know what his brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but
yours may be cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety. Your
physical man will be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the
rate, I should imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about
the average which we find necessary in the kitchen. You will make
your toilet for the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by
rinsing your fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin
pan of water at the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden
pocket-comb before a seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass. Your only
pastime will be to smoke some very vile tobacco in the black stump of
a pipe."
"Pray, spare me!" cried I. "But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of
solacing himself with the weed."
"Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her
description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our
friend Foster never gets so far as the newspaper. When you happen to
sit down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal
proclamation of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be
jogged out of a nap, after supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and
persuaded to go regularly to bed. And on Sundays, when you put on a
blue coat with brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do
but to go and lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare
at the corn growing. And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen,
and will have a tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of
the hogs, and give a guess how much they will weigh after you shall
have stuck and dressed them. Already I have noticed you begin to
speak through your nose, and with a drawl. Pray, if you really did
make any poetry to-day, let us hear it in that kind of utterance!"
"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who
never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry. "Just think of
him penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this
good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out
of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him. If a
farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his
nature insists on it; and if that be the case, let him make it, in
Heaven's name!"
"And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for
she never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me. "You, I
think, cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."
"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth. "I have
hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart! It
matters little what my outward toil may be. Were I a slave, at the
bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in
its ultimate accomplishment, that I do now. Miles Coverdale is not
in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer."
"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt. "I
have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had
been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"
"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no
doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--"I cannot
conceive of being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the
sphere of a strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and
ennobled by its influence!"
This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had
already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other
illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to
make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.
Zenobia and Priscilla! These, I believe (unless my unworthy self
might be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his
mission; and I spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to
conjecture what Hollingsworth meant to do with them--and they with
him! _
Read next: CHAPTER IX - HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA
Read previous: CHAPTER VII - THE CONVALESCENT
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