 | VII.
THE CONVALESCENT. The Blithedale romance |  |
7. VII.
THE CONVALESCENT.
As soon as my incommodities allowed me to think of
past occurrences, I failed not to inquire what had become
of the odd little guest whom Hollingsworth had been the
medium of introducing among us. It now appeared that
poor Priscilla had not so literally fallen out of the clouds
as we were at first inclined to suppose. A letter, which
should have introduced her, had since been received
from one of the city missionaries, containing a certificate
of character, and an allusion to circumstances which, in
the writer's judgment, made it especially desirable that
she should find shelter in our Community. There was a
hint, not very intelligible, implying either that Priscilla
had recently escaped from some particular peril or irksomeness
of position, or else that she was still liable to
this danger or difficulty, whatever it might be. We
should ill have deserved the reputation of a benevolent
fraternity, had we hesitated to entertain a petitioner in
such need, and so strongly recommended to our kindness;
not to mention, moreover, that the strange maiden
had set herself diligently to work, and was doing good
service with her needle. But a slight mist of uncertainty
still floated about Priscilla, and kept her, as yet,
from taking a very decided place among creatures of
flesh and blood.
The mysterious attraction, which, from her first
nothing of its force. I often heard her footsteps, soft and
low, accompanying the light but decided tread of the
latter up the staircase, stealing along the passage-way
by her new friend's side, and pausing while Zenobia
entered my chamber. Occasionally, Zenobia would be
a little annoyed by Priscilla's too close attendance. In
an authoritative and not very kindly tone, she would
advise her to breathe the pleasant air in a walk, or to go
with her work into the barn, holding out half a promise
to come and sit on the hay with her, when at leisure.
Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty requital for her
love. Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with
her. For several minutes together, sometimes, while
my auditory nerves retained the susceptibility of delicate
health, I used to hear a low, pleasant murmur, ascending
from the room below; and at last ascertained it to be
Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to Hollingsworth.
She talked more largely and freely with him
than with Zenobia, towards whom, indeed, her feelings
seemed not so much to be confidence as involuntary
affection. I should have thought all the better of my
own qualities, had Priscilla marked me out for the
third place in her regards. But, though she appeared
to like me tolerably well, I could never flatter myself
with being distinguished by her as Hollingsworth and
Zenobia were.
One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a
gentle tap at my chamber-door. I immediately said,
“Come in, Priscilla!” with an acute sense of the applicant's
identity. Nor was I deceived. It was really
Priscilla, — a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she
the outer limit of girlhood), but much less wan than at
my previous view of her, and far better conditioned both
as to health and spirits. As I first saw her, she had
reminded me of plants that one sometimes observes
doing their best to vegetate among the bricks of an
enclosed court, where there is scanty soil, and never any
sunshine. At present, though with no approach to
bloom, there were indications that the girl had human
blood in her veins.
Priscilla came softly to my bed-side, and held out an
article of snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly
ironed. She did not seem bashful, nor anywise embarrassed.
My weakly condition, I suppose, supplied a
medium in which she could approach me.
“Do not you need this?” asked she. “I have made
it for you.”
It was a night-cap!
“My dear Priscilla,” said I, smiling, “I never had on a
night-cap in my life! But perhaps it will be better for
me to wear one, now that I am a miserable invalid.
How admirably you have done it! No, no; I never can
think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought night-cap
as this, unless it be in the day-time, when I sit up to
receive company.”
“It is for use, not beauty,” answered Priscilla. “I
could have embroidered it, and made it much prettier, if
I pleased.”
While holding up the night-cap, and admiring the fine
needle-work, I perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter,
which she was waiting for me to take. It had
arrived from the village post-office that morning. As I
it back, and held it against her bosom, with both hands
clasped over it, in a way that had probably grown
habitual to her. Now, on turning my eyes from the
night-cap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air,
though not her figure, and the expression of her face,
but not its features, had a resemblance to what I had
often seen in a friend of mine, one of the most gifted
women of the age. I cannot describe it. The points
easiest to convey to the reader were, a certain curve of
the shoulders, and a partial closing of the eyes, which
seemed to look more penetratingly into my own eyes,
through the narrowed apertures, than if they had been
open at full width. It was a singular anomaly of likeness
coëxisting with perfect dissimilitude.
“Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?” said I.
She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite
lost the look that had drawn my notice.
“Priscilla,” I inquired, “did you ever see Miss
Margaret Fuller?”
“No,” she answered.
“Because,” said I, “you reminded me of her, just
now; and it happens, strangely enough, that this very
letter is from her.”
Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.
“I wish people would not fancy such odd things in
me!” she said, rather petulantly. “How could I possibly
make myself resemble this lady, merely by holding
her letter in my hand?”
“Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain
it,” I replied; “nor do I suppose that the letter had anything
more.”
She hastened out of the room, and this was the last
that I saw of Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.
Being much alone, during my recovery, I read interminably
in Mr. Emerson's Essays, the Dial, Carlyle's
works, George Sand's romances (lent me by Zenobia), and
other books which one or another of the brethren or
sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little
else, most of these utterances were like the cry of some
solitary sentinel, whose station was on the outposts of
the advance-guard of human progression; or, sometimes,
the voice came sadly from among the shattered ruins of
the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future.
They were well adapted (better, at least, than any other
intellectual products, the volatile essence of which had
heretofore tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like
ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably further
into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of
crusaders had ever marched before. Fourier's works,
also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a
good deal of my attention, from the analogy which I
could not but recognize between his system and our
own. There was far less resemblance, it is true, than
the world chose to imagine, inasmuch as the two theories
differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their
main principles.
I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated,
for his benefit, some of the passages that chiefly
impressed me.
“When, as a consequence of human improvement,”
said I, “the globe shall arrive at its final perfection, the
lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in Fourier's
time. He calls it limonade a cedre. It is positively a
fact! Just imagine the city-docks filled, every day, with
a flood-tide of this delectable beverage!”
“Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it, at
once?” asked Hollingsworth. “The jack-tars would be
delighted to go down in ships and do business in such
an element.”
I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly
could, several points of Fourier's system, illustrating
them with here and there a page or two, and asking
Hollingsworth's opinion as to the expediency of introducing
these beautiful peculiarities into our own practice.
“Let me hear no more of it!” cried he, in utter disgust.
“I never will forgive this fellow! He has committed
the unpardonable sin; for what more monstrous
iniquity could the devil himself contrive than to choose
the selfish principle, — the principle of all human wrong,
the very blackness of man's heart, the portion of ourselves
which we shudder at, and which it is the whole
aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate, — to choose it as
the master-workman of his system? To seize upon and
foster whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial and
abominable corruptions have cankered into our nature,
to be the efficient instruments of his infernal regeneration!
And his consummated Paradise, as he pictures
it, would be worthy of the agency which he counts upon
for establishing it. The nauseous villain!”
“Nevertheless,” remarked I, “in consideration of the
promised delights of his system, — so very proper, as
— I cannot but wonder that universal France
did not adopt his theory, at a moment's warning. But
is there not something very characteristic of his nation
in Fourier's manner of putting forth his views? He
makes no claim to inspiration. He has not persuaded
himself — as Swedenborg did, and as any other than a
Frenchman would, with a mission of like importance to
communicate — that he speaks with authority from
above. He promulgates his system, so far as I can perceive,
entirely on his own responsibility. He has
searched out and discovered the whole counsel of the
Almighty, in respect to mankind, past, present, and for
exactly seventy thousand years to come, by the mere
force and cunning of his individual intellect!”
“Take the book out of my sight,” said Hollingsworth,
with great virulence of expression, “or, I tell you fairly,
I shall fling it in the fire! And as for Fourier, let him
make a Paradise, if he can, of Gehenna, where, as I
conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this moment!”
“And bellowing, I suppose,” said I, — not that I felt
any ill-will towards Fourier, but merely wanted to give
the finishing touch to Hollingsworth's image, — “bellowing
for the least drop of his beloved limonade a cedre!”
There is but little profit to be expected in attempting
to argue with a man who allows himself to declaim in
this manner; so I dropt the subject, and never took it
up again.
But had the system at which he was so enraged combined
almost any amount of human wisdom, spiritual
insight, and imaginative beauty, I question whether
I began to discern that he had come among us actuated
by no real sympathy with our feelings and our hopes,
but chiefly because we were estranging ourselves from
the world, with which his lonely and exclusive object in
life had already put him at odds. Hollingsworth must
have been originally endowed with a great spirit of
benevolence, deep enough and warm enough to be the
source of as much disinterested good as Providence often
allows a human being the privilege of conferring upon
his fellows. This native instinct yet lived within him.
I myself had profited by it, in my necessity. It was
seen, too, in his treatment of Priscilla. Such casual circumstances
as were here involved would quicken his
divine power of sympathy, and make him seem, while
their influence lasted, the tenderest man and the truest
friend on earth. But, by and by, you missed the tenderness
of yesterday, and grew drearily conscious that Hollingsworth
had a closer friend than ever you could be;
and this friend was the cold, spectral monster which he
had himself conjured up, and on which he was wasting
all the warmth of his heart, and of which, at last, — as
these men of a mighty purpose so invariably do, — he
had grown to be the bond-slave. It was his philanthropic
theory.
This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate,
considering that it had been mainly brought about by
the very ardor and exuberance of his philanthropy.
Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual. He had
taught his benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively
through one channel; so that there was nothing to spare
for other great manifestations of love to man, nor scarcely
could minister, in some way, to the terrible egotism
which he mistook for an angel of God. Had Hollingsworth's
education been more enlarged, he might not so
inevitably have stumbled into this pit-fall. But this
identical pursuit had educated him. He knew absolutely
nothing, except in a single direction, where he
had thought so energetically, and felt to such a depth,
that, no doubt, the entire reason and justice of the universe
appeared to be concentrated thitherward.
It is my private opinion that, at this period of his
life, Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with
other crazy people (among whom I include humorists
of every degree), it required all the constancy of friendship
to restrain his associates from pronouncing him
an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one
string, — such multiform presentation of one idea! His
specific object (of which he made the public more than
sufficiently aware, through the medium of lectures and
pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the construction of
an edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment. On
this foundation, he purposed to devote himself and a
few disciples to the reform and mental culture of our
criminal brethren. His visionary edifice was Hollingsworth's
one castle in the air; it was the material type
in which his philanthropic dream strove to embody
itself; and he made the scheme more definite, and
caught hold of it the more strongly, and kept his clutch
the more pertinaciously, by rendering it visible to the
bodily eye. I have seen him, a hundred times, with a
pencil and sheet of paper, sketching the façade, the sideview,
or the rear of the structure, or planning the internal
plan those of the projected home where he meant to be
happy with his wife and children. I have known him
to begin a model of the building with little stones,
gathered at the brook-side, whither we had gone to
cool ourselves in the sultry noon of haying-time. Unlike
all other ghosts, his spirit haunted an edifice which,
instead of being time-worn, and full of storied love, and
joy, and sorrow, had never yet come into existence.
“Dear friend,” said I, once, to Hollingsworth, before
leaving my sick-chamber, “I heartily wish that I could
make your schemes my schemes, because it would be so
great a happiness to find myself treading the same path
with you. But I am afraid there is not stuff in me
stern enough for a philanthropist, — or not in this
peculiar direction, — or, at all events, not solely in this.
Can you bear with me, if such should prove to be the
case?”
“I will, at least, wait a while,” answered Hollingsworth,
gazing at me sternly and gloomily. “But how
can you be my life-long friend, except you strive with
me towards the great object of my life?”
Heaven forgive me! A horrible suspicion crept into
my heart, and stung the very core of it as with the fangs
of an adder. I wondered whether it were possible that
Hollingsworth could have watched by my bed-side, with
all that devoted care, only for the ulterior purpose of
making me a proselyte to his views!
| VII.
THE CONVALESCENT. The Blithedale romance | |