 | XVI.
LEAVE-TAKINGS. The Blithedale romance |  |
16. XVI.
LEAVE-TAKINGS.
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 sea-side, 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
sea-shore 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 sun-burnt 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 dream-like 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
(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
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 stand-point.
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 forebore to do so, because, in
all such general salutations, the penance is fully equal to
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
together with that straight-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 door-step 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 pig-sty, 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
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 live-stock, 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!”
| XVI.
LEAVE-TAKINGS. The Blithedale romance | |