 | XV.
A CRISIS. The Blithedale romance |  |
15. XV.
A CRISIS.
Thus the summer was passing away; — a summer of
toil, of interest, of something that was not pleasure, but
which went deep into my heart, and there became a rich
experience. I found myself looking forward to years, if
not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system. The
Community were now beginning to form their permanent
plans. One of our purposes was to erect a Phalanstery
(as I think we called it, after Fourier; but the phraseology
of those days is not very fresh in my remembrance),
where the great and general family should have
its abiding-place. Individual members, too, who made
it a point of religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive
home, were selecting sites for their cottages, by
the wood-side, or on the breezy swells, or in the sheltered
nook of some little valley, according as their taste might
lean towards snugness or the picturesque. Altogether,
by projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a
show of novelty to existence, and contemplated it as
hopefully as if the soil beneath our feet had not been
fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on
every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had
imposed itself as a hitherto unwedded bride.
Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these
prospects. It was easy to perceive, however, that he
spoke with little or no fervor, but either as questioning
quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of
his. Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he
and I were repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself
with sallying forward into the future time.
“When we come to be old men,” I said, “they will
call us uncles, or fathers, — Father Hollingsworth and
Uncle Coverdale, — and we will look back cheerfully to
these early days, and make a romantic story for the
young people (and if a little more romantic than truth
may warrant, it will be no harm) out of our severe trials
and hardships. In a century or two, we shall, every
one of us, be mythical personages, or exceedingly picturesque
and poetical ones, at all events. They will have
a great public hall, in which your portrait, and mine,
and twenty other faces that are living now, shall be hung
up; and as for me, I will be painted in my shirt-sleeves,
and with the sleeves rolled up, to show my muscular
development. What stories will be rife among them
about our mighty strength!” continued I, lifting a big
stone and putting it into its place; “though our posterity
will really be far stronger than ourselves, after several
generations of a simple, natural, and active life. What
legends of Zenobia's beauty, and Priscilla's slender and
shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities which
make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light! In due
course of ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic
poem; and we will ourselves — at least, I will — bend
unseen over the future poet, and lend him inspiration
while he writes it.”
“You seem,” said Hollingsworth, “to be trying how
much nonsense you can pour out in a breath.”
“I wish you would see fit to comprehend,” retorted
I, “that the profoundest wisdom must be mingled with
nine-tenths of nonsense, else it is not worth the breath
that utters it. But I do long for the cottages to be built,
that the creeping plants may begin to run over them, and
the moss to gather on the walls, and the trees — which
we will set out — to cover them with a breadth of
shadow. This spick-and-span novelty does not quite
suit my taste. It is time, too, for children to be born
among us. The first-born child is still to come. And
I shall never feel as if this were a real, practical, as well
as poetical, system of human life, until somebody has
sanctified it by death.”
“A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!” said Hollingsworth.
“As good as any other,” I replied. “I wonder, Hollingsworth,
who, of all these strong men, and fair women
and maidens, is doomed the first to die. Would it not
be well, even before we have absolute need of it, to fix
upon a spot for a cemetery? Let us choose the rudest,
roughest, most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden-ground;
and Death shall teach us to beautify it, grave
by grave. By our sweet, calm way of dying, and the
airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral
rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model
into tomb-stones, the final scene shall lose its terrors; so
that hereafter it may be happiness to live, and bliss to
die. None of us must die young. Yet, should Providence
ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful, but
affect us with a tender, delicious, only half melancholy
and almost smiling pathos!”
“That is to say,” muttered Hollingsworth, “you will
listen to me, Coverdale. Your fantastic anticipations
make me discern all the more forcibly what a wretched,
unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a
precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine
that any such realities as you, and many others here,
have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass?”
“Certainly, I do,” said I. “Of course, when the
reality comes, it will wear the every-day, commonplace,
dusty, and rather homely garb, that reality always does
put on. But, setting aside the ideal charm, I hold that
our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common
sense.”
“You only half believe what you say,” rejoined Hollingsworth;
“and as for me, I neither have faith in your
dream, nor would care the value of this pebble for its
realization, were that possible. And what more do you
want of it? It has given you a theme for poetry. Let
that content you. But now I ask you to be, at last, a
man of sobriety and earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise
which is worth all our strength, and the strength
of a thousand mightier than we.”
There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation
that ensued. It is enough to say that Hollingsworth
once more brought forward his rigid and unconquerable
idea; a scheme for the reformation of the
wicked by methods moral, intellectual and industrial, by
the sympathy of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds,
and by opening to his pupils the possibility of a worthier
life than that which had become their fate. It appeared,
unless he over-estimated his own means, that Hollingsworth
held it at his choice (and he did so choose) to
planted our Community, and which had not yet been
made irrevocably ours, by purchase. It was just the
foundation that he desired. Our beginnings might readily
be adapted to his great end. The arrangements
already completed would work quietly into his system.
So plausible looked his theory, and, more than that, so
practical, — such an air of reasonableness had he, by
patient thought, thrown over it, — each segment of it
was contrived to dove-tail into all the rest with such a
complicated applicability, and so ready was he with a
response for every objection, that, really, so far as logic
and argument went, he had the matter all his own way.
“But,” said I, “whence can you, having no means of
your own, derive the enormous capital which is essential
to this experiment? State-street, I imagine, would not
draw its purse-strings very liberally in aid of such a
speculation.”
“I have the funds — as much, at least, as is needed for
a commencement — at command,” he answered. “They
can be produced within a month, if necessary.”
My thoughts reverted to Zenobia. It could only be
her wealth which Hollingsworth was appropriating so
lavishly. And on what conditions was it to be had?
Did she fling it into the scheme with the uncalculating
generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her
impulse to be generous at all? And did she fling herself
along with it? But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an
explanation.
“And have you no regrets,” I inquired, “in overthrowing
this fair system of our new life, which has been
planned so deeply, and is now beginning to flourish so
we can yet see, how practicable! The ages have waited
for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed
to carry on our mortal existence in love and mutual
help! Hollingsworth, I would be loth to take the ruin
of this enterprise upon my conscience.”
“Then let it rest wholly upon mine!” he answered,
knitting his black brows. “I see through the system.
It is full of defects, — irremediable and damning ones!
— from first to last, there is nothing else! I grasp it in
my hand, and find no substance whatever. There is not
human nature in it.”
“Why are you so secret in your operations?” I
asked. “God forbid that I should accuse you of intentional
wrong; but the besetting sin of a philanthropist,
it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His
sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable
men. At some point of his course — I know not exactly
when or where — he is tempted to palter with the right,
and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that the
importance of his public ends renders it allowable to
throw aside his private conscience. O, my dear friend,
beware this error! If you meditate the overthrow of this
establishment, call together our companions, state your
design, support it with all your eloquence, but allow them
an opportunity of defending themselves.”
“It does not suit me,” said Hollingsworth. “Nor is
it my duty to do so.”
“I think it is,” replied I.
Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate,
inexorably.
“I will not argue the point,” said he. “What I
word, — whether I am to look for your coöperation in
this great scheme of good? Take it up with me! Be
my brother in it! If offers you (what you have told me,
over and over again, that you most need) a purpose in
life, worthy of the extremest self-devotion, — worthy of
martyrdom, should God so order it! In this view, I
present it to you. You can greatly benefit mankind.
Your peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable
of being so wrought into this enterprise that not one of
them need lie idle. Strike hands with me, and from
this moment you shall never again feel the languor and
vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied man.
There may be no more aimless beauty in your life; but,
in its stead, there shall be strength, courage, immitigable
will — everything that a manly and generous nature
should desire! We shall succeed! We shall have done
our best for this miserable world; and happiness (which
never comes but incidentally) will come to us unawares.”
It seemed his intention to say no more. But, after he
had quite broken off, his deep eyes filled with tears, and
he held out both his hands to me.
“Coverdale,” he murmured, “there is not the man in
this wide world whom I can love as I could you. Do
not forsake me!”
As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness
and dimness of so many years, there is still a sensation
as if Hollingsworth had caught hold of my heart, and
were pulling it towards him with an almost irresistible
force. It is a mystery to me how I withstood it.
But, in truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy
nothing but what was odious. A loathsomeness that
ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a
thousand human hearts, and that we should spend our
lives in an experiment of transmuting it into virtue! Had
I but touched his extended hand, Hollingsworth's magnetism
would perhaps have penetrated me with his own
conception of all these matters. But I stood aloof. I
fortified myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose
had not been too gigantic for his integrity, impelling
him to trample on considerations that should have been
paramount to every other.
“Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise?” I
asked.
“She is,” said Hollingsworth.
“She! — the beautiful! — the gorgeous!” I exclaimed.
“And how have you prevailed with such a woman to
work in this squalid element?”
“Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect,”
he answered; “but by addressing whatever is best and
noblest in her.”
Hollingsworth was looking on the ground. But,
as he often did so, — generally, indeed, in his habitual
moods of thought, — I could not judge whether it was
from any special unwillingness now to meet my eyes.
What it was that dictated my next question, I cannot
precisely say. Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into
my mouth, and, as it were, asked itself so involuntarily,
that there must needs have been an aptness in it.
“What is to become of Priscilla?”
Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely, and with glowing
eyes. He could not have shown any other kind of
sword.
“Why do you bring in the names of these women?”
said he, after a moment of pregnant silence. “What
have they to do with the proposal which I make you?
I must have your answer! Will you devote yourself,
and sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of
friends forever?”
“In Heaven's name, Hollingsworth,” cried I, getting
angry, and glad to be angry, because so only was it possible
to oppose his tremendous concentrativeness and
indomitable will, “cannot you conceive that a man may
wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on
some other plan than precisely that which you have laid
down? And will you cast off a friend for no unworthiness,
but merely because he stands upon his right as an
individual being, and looks at matters through his own
optics, instead of yours?”
“Be with me,” said Hollingsworth, “or be against
me! There is no third choice for you.”
`Take this, then, as my decision,” I answered. “I
doubt the wisdom of your scheme. Furthermore, I
greatly fear that the methods by which you allow yourself
to pursue it are such as cannot stand the scrutiny
of an unbiassed conscience.”
“And you will not join me?”
“No!”
I never said the word — and certainly can never have
it to say hereafter — that cost me a thousandth part so
hard an effort as did that one syllable. The heart-pang
was not merely figurative, but an absolute torture of the
breast. I was gazing steadfastly at Hollingsworth. It
ghastly paleness — always so terrific on a swarthy face
— overspread his features. There was a convulsive
movement of his throat, as if he were forcing down some
words that struggled and fought for utterance. Whether
words of anger, or words of grief, I cannot tell; although,
many and many a time, I have vainly tormented myself
with conjecturing which of the two they were. One
other appeal to my friendship, — such as once, already,
Hollingsworth had made, — taking me in the revulsion
that followed a strenuous exercise of opposing will,
would completely have subdued me. But he left the
matter there.
“Well!” said he.
And that was all! I should have been thankful for
one word more, even had it shot me through the heart,
as mine did him. But he did not speak it; and, after
a few moments, with one accord, we set to work again,
repairing the stone fence. Hollingsworth, I observed,
wrought like a Titan; and, for my own part, I lifted
stones which at this day — or, in a calmer mood, at
that one — I should no more have thought it possible to
stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back.
| XV.
A CRISIS. The Blithedale romance | |