________________________________________________
_ A few days after the tragic passage-at-arms between Hollingsworth and
me, I appeared at the dinner-table actually dressed in a coat,
instead of my customary blouse; with a satin cravat, too, a white
vest, and several other things that made me seem strange and
outlandish to myself. As for my companions, this unwonted spectacle
caused a great stir upon the wooden benches that bordered either side
of our homely board.
"What's in the wind now, Miles?" asked one of them. "Are you
deserting us?"
"Yes, for a week or two," said I. "It strikes me that my health
demands a little relaxation of labor, and a short visit to the
seaside, during the dog-days."
"You look like it!" grumbled Silas Foster, not greatly pleased with
the idea of losing an efficient laborer before the stress of the
season was well over. "Now, here's a pretty fellow! His shoulders
have broadened a matter of six inches since he came among us; he can
do his day's work, if he likes, with any man or ox on the farm; and
yet he talks about going to the seashore for his health! Well, well,
old woman," added he to his wife, "let me have a plateful of that
pork and cabbage! I begin to feel in a very weakly way. When the
others have had their turn, you and I will take a jaunt to Newport or
Saratoga!"
"Well, but, Mr. Foster," said I, "you must allow me to take a little
breath."
"Breath!" retorted the old yeoman. "Your lungs have the play of a
pair of blacksmith's bellows already. What on earth do you want
more? But go along! I understand the business. We shall never see
your face here again. Here ends the reformation of the world, so far
as Miles Coverdale has a hand in it!"
"By no means," I replied. "I am resolute to die in the last ditch,
for the good of the cause."
"Die in a ditch!" muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee
intolerance of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth
of July, the autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,--
"die in a ditch! I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there
were no steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it!"
The truth was, that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had
come over me. Blithedale was no longer what it had been. Everything
was suddenly faded. The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and
pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the
lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had
blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and
shadiest of my contemplative
recesses. The change will be recognized by many, who, after a period
of happiness, have endeavored to go on with the same kind of life, in
the same scene, in spite of the alteration or withdrawal of some
principal circumstance. They discover (what heretofore, perhaps,
they had not known) that it was this which gave the bright color and
vivid reality to the whole affair.
I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but
with Zenobia and Priscilla. As regarded the two latter, it was that
dreamlike and miserable sort of change that denies you the privilege
to complain, because you can assert no positive injury, nor lay your
finger on anything tangible. It is a matter which you do not see,
but feel, and which, when you try to analyze it, seems to lose its
very existence, and resolve itself into a sickly humor of your own.
Your understanding, possibly, may put faith in this denial. But your
heart will not so easily rest satisfied. It incessantly remonstrates,
though, most of the time, in a bass-note, which you do not
separately distinguish; but, now and then, with a sharp cry,
importunate to be heard, and resolute to claim belief. "Things are
not as they were!" it keeps saying. "You shall not impose on me! I
will never be quiet! I will throb painfully! I will be heavy, and
desolate, and shiver with cold! For I, your deep heart, know when to
be miserable, as once I knew when to be happy! All is changed for us!
You are beloved no more!" And were my life to be spent over again,
I would invariably lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths,
however clamorous the music and the merriment of a more superficial
region.
My outbreak with Hollingsworth, though never definitely known to our
associates, had really an effect upon the moral atmosphere of the
Community. It was incidental to the closeness of relationship into
which we had brought ourselves, that an unfriendly state of feeling
could not occur between any two members without the whole society
being more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby. This
species of nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough,
sentimentally considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of
love among us) was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical
operation, mortal tempers being so infirm and variable as they are.
If one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the
tingle was immediately felt on the same side of everybody's head.
Thus, even on the supposition that we were far less quarrelsome than
the rest of the world, a great deal of time was necessarily wasted in
rubbing our ears.
Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at
least a temporary novelty. I thought of going across the Rocky
Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile; of offering myself a
volunteer on the Exploring Expedition; of taking a ramble of years,
no matter in what direction, and coming back on the other side of the
world. Then, should the colonists of Blithedale have established
their enterprise on a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim
staff and dusty shoon, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere. Or,
in case Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his School of
Reform, as he now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough, by
that time, to give me what I was inclined to think the only
trustworthy hold on his affections. Meanwhile, before deciding on
any ultimate plan, I determined to remove myself to a little distance,
and take an exterior view of what we had all been about.
In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as
was going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that
were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a
noble and happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and,
having a decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel
it) getting quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing
state of the world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind
of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or
ought to be. It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe
the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or
fast becoming so; that the crust of the earth in many places was
broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a
day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex.
Our great globe floated in the atmosphere of infinite space like an
unsubstantial bubble. No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity,
if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people,
without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to
correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.
It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with
the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the
merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had
not come into vogue since yesterday morning.
The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the
sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but
forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the
penance is fully equal to the pleasure. So I kissed none of them;
and nobody, to say the truth, seemed to expect it.
"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the
watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the
rights of women?"
"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;
"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have
the force to exercise them."
She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,
with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled
light of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate
flame, flickering and fitful.
"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all
the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and
can never be lived over again. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I
have been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for
lack of a better and wiser one? But you are too young to be my
father confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like
one of those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a
tragedy-queen."
"I would, at least, be loyal and faithful," answered I; "and would
counsel you with an honest purpose, if not wisely."
"Yes," said Zenobia, "you would be only too wise, too honest.
Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's
expense!"
"Ah, Zenobia," I exclaimed, "if you would but let me speak!"
"By no means," she replied, "especially when you have just resumed
the whole series of social conventionalisms, together with that
strait-bodied coat. I would as lief open my heart to a lawyer or a
clergyman! No, no, Mr. Coverdale; if I choose a counsellor, in the
present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman;
and I rather apprehend that the latter would be likeliest of the two
to speak the fitting word. It needs a wild steersman when we voyage
through chaos! The anchor is up,--farewell!"
Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had betaken herself into a
corner, and set to work on a little purse. As I approached her, she
let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look; for, with all her
delicacy of nerves, there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla,
and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary
commotion, like the water in a deep well.
"Will you give me that purse, Priscilla," said I, "as a parting
keepsake?"
"Yes," she answered, "if you will wait till it is finished."
"I must not wait, even for that," I replied. "Shall I find you here,
on my return?"
"I never wish to go away," said she.
"I have sometimes thought," observed I, smiling, "that you, Priscilla,
are a little prophetess, or, at least, that you have spiritual
intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people.
If that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen;
for I am tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return
even so soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed.
Have you any impressions of this nature?"
"Ah, no," said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively. "If any such
misfortune is coming, the shadow has not reached me yet. Heaven
forbid! I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one
summer follow another, and all just like this."
"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike," said
I, with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself. "Times
change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily,
so much the worse for us. Good-by, Priscilla!"
I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor
returned. Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass; it had
room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned
me.
On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth. I had a momentary impulse to
hold out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted
both. When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not
well to mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace
civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead
henceforth to him, and he to me, there could be no propriety in our
chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or
playing at looks of courtesy with eyes that were impenetrable beneath
the glaze and the film. We passed, therefore, as if mutually
invisible.
I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was,
that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty,
and take leave of the swine! There they lay, buried as deeply among
the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very
symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort. They were asleep,
drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and
down. Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked
dimly forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle
grunt; not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath
for that particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary
inhalation. They were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive,
in their own corporeal substance. The very unreadiness and
oppression wherewith these greasy citizens gained breath enough to
keep their life-machinery in sluggish movement appeared to make them
only the more sensible of the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their
existence. Peeping at me an instant out of their small, red, hardly
perceptible eyes, they dropt asleep again; yet not so far asleep but
that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream
and reality.
"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas
Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze. "I shall have these fat
fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell
you!"
"O cruel Silas, what a horrible idea!" cried I. "All the rest of us,
men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are
bedevilled with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you
mean to cut their throats and eat them! It would be more for the
general comfort to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we
should be!" _
Read next: CHAPTER XVII - THE HOTEL
Read previous: CHAPTER XV - A CRISIS
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