 | XXIII.
A VILLAGE-HALL. The Blithedale romance |  |
23. XXIII.
A VILLAGE-HALL.
Well, I betook myself away, and wandered up and
down, like an exorcised spirit that had been driven from
its old haunts after a mighty struggle. It takes down
the solitary pride of man, beyond most other things, to
find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that
have grown irksome. The bands that were silken once
are apt to become iron fetters when we desire to shake
them off. Our souls, after all, are not our own. We
convey a property in them to those with whom we
associate; but to what extent can never be known, until
we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to
resume an exclusive sway over ourselves. Thus, in all
the weeks of my absence, my thoughts continually
reverted back, brooding over the by-gone months, and
bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a
trace of themselves in their passage. I spent painful
hours in recalling these trifles, and rendering them more
misty and unsubstantial than at first by the quantity of
speculative musing thus kneaded in with them. Hollingsworth,
Zenobia, Priscilla! These three had absorbed
my life into themselves. Together with an inexpressible
longing to know their fortunes, there was likewise a
morbid resentment of my own pain, and a stubborn
reluctance to come again within their sphere.
All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised
were then in the habit of bestowing on our
socialist enterprise. There was one paragraph, which,
if I rightly guessed its purport, bore reference to Zenobia,
but was too darkly hinted to convey even thus much of
certainty. Hollingsworth, too, with his philanthropic
project, afforded the penny-a-liners a theme for some
savage and bloody-minded jokes; and, considerably to
my surprise, they affected me with as much indignation
as if we had still been friends.
Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my
brown and toil-hardened hands to reäccustom themselves
to gloves. Old habits, such as were merely external,
returned upon me with wonderful promptitude. My
superficial talk, too, assumed altogether a worldly tone.
Meeting former acquaintances, who showed themselves
inclined to ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of
human welfare, I spoke of the recent phase of my life as
indeed fair matter for a jest. But I also gave them to
understand that it was, at most, only an experiment, on
which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear.
It had enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and
agreeable way, had afforded me some grotesque specimens
of artificial simplicity, and could not, therefore, so
far as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure. In no
one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my
three friends. They dwelt in a profounder region. The
more I consider myself as I then was, the more do I
recognize how deeply my connection with those three
had affected all my being.
As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I
might, in the time I was away from Blithedale, have
But my wanderings were confined within a very limited
sphere. I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string
about its leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and
keeping up a restless activity to no purpose. Thus it
was still in our familiar Massachusetts, — in one of its
white country-villages, — that I must next particularize
an incident.
The scene was one of those lyceum-halls, of which
almost every village has now its own, dedicated to that
sober and pallid, or rather drab-colored, mode of winter-evening
entertainment, the lecture. Of late years, this
has come strangely into vogue, when the natural tendency
of things would seem to be to substitute lettered
for oral methods of addressing the public. But, in halls
like this, besides the winter course of lectures, there is a
rich and varied series of other exhibitions. Hither
comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious tongues;
the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous transformations
of plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking
in your hat, and his cellar of choice liquors represented
in one small bottle. Here, also, the itinerant professor
instructs separate classes of ladies and gentlemen in
physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid
of real skeletons, and mannikins in wax, from Paris.
Here is to be heard the choir of Ethiopian melodists,
and to be seen the diorama of Moscow or Bunker Hill,
or the moving panorama of the Chinese wall. Here is
displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the
wide catholicism of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes
and statesmen, the pope and the Mormon prophet, kings,
queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every sort of person,
even the most famous done in wax. And here, in this
many-purposed hall (unless the selectmen of the village
chance to have more than their share of the Puritanism
which, however diversified with later patchwork, still
gives its prevailing tint to New England character), here
the company of strolling players sets up its little stage,
and claims patronage for the legitimate drama.
But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, a
number of printed handbills — stuck up in the bar-room,
and on the sign-post of the hotel, and on the meetinghouse
porch, and distributed largely through the village
— had promised the inhabitants an interview with
that celebrated and hitherto inexplicable phenomenon,
the Veiled Lady!
The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical descent
of seats towards a platform, on which stood a desk, two
lights, a stool, and a capacious antique chair. The audience
was of a generally decent and respectable character:
old farmers, in their Sunday black coats, with shrewd,
hard, sun-dried faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than
any other expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored
attire; pretty young men, — the schoolmaster,
the lawyer or student at law, the shopkeeper, — all
looking rather suburban than rural. In these days,
there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual
labor of the soil leaves its earth-mould on the person.
There was likewise a considerable proportion of young
and middle-aged women, many of them stern in feature,
with marked foreheads, and a very definite line of eyebrow;
a type of womanhood in which a bold intellectual
development seems to be keeping pace with the progressive
people I took note, at first, according to my custom.
But I ceased to do so the moment that my eyes fell on an
individual who sat two or three seats below me, immovable,
apparently deep in thought, with his back, of course,
towards me, and his face turned steadfastly upon the
platform.
After sitting a while in contemplation of this person's
familiar contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over
the intervening benches, lay my hand on his shoulder,
put my mouth close to his ear, and address him in a
sepulchral, melo-dramatic whisper:
“Hollingsworth! where have you left Zenobia?”
His nerves, however, were proof against my attack.
He turned half around, and looked me in the face with
great, sad eyes, in which there was neither kindness nor
resentment, nor any perceptible surprise.
“Zenobia, when I last saw her,” he answered, “was
at Blithedale.”
He said no more. But there was a great deal of talk
going on near me, among a knot of people who might
be considered as representing the mysticism, or rather
the mystic sensuality, of this singular age. The nature
of the exhibition that was about to take place had probably
given the turn to their conversation.
I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some
stranger stories than ever were written in a romance;
told, too, with a simple, unimaginative steadfastness, which
was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor to receive
them into the category of established facts. He cited
instances of the miraculous power of one human being
over the will and passions of another; insomuch that
a man possessing this potency, and the strong love of
years melted away like a vapor. At the bidding of one
of these wizards, the maiden, with her lover's kiss still
burning on her lips, would turn from him with icy indifference;
the newly-made widow would dig up her buried
heart out of her young husband's grave before the sods
had taken root upon it; a mother, with her babe's milk in
her bosom, would thrust away her child. Human character
was but soft wax in his hands; and guilt, or virtue,
only the forms into which he should see fit to mould it.
The religious sentiment was a flame which he could
blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly
extinguish. It is unutterable, the horror and disgust
with which I listened, and saw that, if these things were
to be believed, the individual soul was virtually annihilated,
and all that is sweet and pure in our present life
debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility
was made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once
impossible, and not worth acceptance. But I would
have perished on the spot, sooner than believe it.
The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that
have followed in their train, — such as tables upset by
invisible agencies, bells self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly
music performed on jewsharps, — had not yet arrived.
Alas, my countrymen, methinks we have fallen on an
evil age! If these phenomena have not humbug at the
bottom, so much the worse for us. What can they indicate,
in a spiritual way, except that the soul of man is
descending to a lower point than it has ever before
reached while incarnate? We are pursuing a downward
course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves
requital of their gross and evil lives, has degraded below
humanity! To hold intercourse with spirits of this
order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more
vile than earthly dust. These goblins, if they exist at
all, are but the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere
refuse-stuff, adjudged unworthy of the eternal world,
and, on the most favorable supposition, dwindling gradually
into nothingness. The less we have to say to
them the better, lest we share their fate!
The audience now began to be impatient; they signified
their desire for the entertainment to commence by
thump of sticks and stamp of boot-heels. Nor was it a
great while longer before, in response to their call, there
appeared a bearded personage in oriental robes, looking
like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights. He
came upon the platform from a side-door, saluted the
spectators, not with a salaam, but a bow, took his station
at the desk, and first blowing his nose with a white handkerchief,
prepared to speak. The environment of the
homely village-hall, and the absence of many ingenious
contrivances of stage-effect with which the exhibition
had heretofore been set off, seemed to bring the artifice
of this character more openly upon the surface. No
sooner did I behold the bearded enchanter, than, laying
my hand again on Hollingsworth's shoulder, I whispered
in his ear,
“Do you know him?”
“I never saw the man before,” he muttered, without
turning his head.
But I had seen him three times already. Once, on
occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second
Zenobia's drawing-room. It was Westervelt. A quick
association of ideas made me shudder from head to foot;
and again, like an evil spirit, bringing up reminiscences
of a man's sins, I whispered a question in Hollingsworth's
ear, —
“What have you done with Priscilla?”
He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife
into him, writhed himself round on his seat, glared
fiercely into my eyes, but answered not a word.
The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the
psychological phenomena, as he termed them, which it
was his purpose to exhibit to the spectators. There
remains no very distinct impression of it on my memory.
It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive
show of spirituality, yet really imbued throughout
with a cold and dead materialism. I shivered, as at a
current of chill air issuing out of a sepulchral vault, and
bringing the smell of corruption along with it. He
spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world;
an era that would link soul to soul, and the present life
to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should
finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious
brotherhood. He described (in a strange, philosophical
guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter
of chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty
result was to be effected; nor would it have surprised me,
had he pretended to hold up a portion of his universally
pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in a glass phial.
At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned
with his hand, — once, twice, thrice, — and a figure
came gliding upon the platform, enveloped in a long veil
of silvery whiteness. It fell about her like the texture
the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately
discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was
graceful, free and unembarrassed, like that of a person
accustomed to be the spectacle of thousands; or, possibly,
a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with which
this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was
wholly unconscious of being the central object to all
those straining eyes.
Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious
courtesy, but at the same time a remarkable decisiveness),
the figure placed itself in the great chair. Sitting
there, in such visible obscurity, it was perhaps as much
like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as anything
that stage trickery could devise. The hushed
breathing of the spectators proved how high-wrought
were their anticipations of the wonders to be performed
through the medium of this incomprehensible creature.
I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different
presentiment of some strange event at hand.
“You see before you the Veiled Lady,” said the
bearded Professor, advancing to the verge of the platform.
“By the agency of which I have just spoken, she
is at this moment in communion with the spiritual
world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment,
having been dipped, as it were, and essentially
imbued, through the potency of my art, with the fluid
medium of spirits. Slight and ethereal as it seems, the
limitations of time and space have no existence within
its folds. This hall — these hundreds of faces, encompassing
her within so narrow an amphitheatre — are of
thinner substance, in her view, than the airiest vapor
that the clouds are made of. She beholds the Absolute!”
As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological
experiments, the exhibiter suggested that some
of his auditors should endeavor to make the Veiled Lady
sensible of their presence by such methods — provided
only no touch were laid upon her person — as they
might deem best adapted to that end. Accordingly,
several deep-lunged country-fellows, who looked as if
they might have blown the apparition away with a breath,
ascended the platform. Mutually encouraging one
another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil
stirred like a wreath of vanishing mist; they smote
upon the floor with bludgeons; they perpetrated so
hideous a clamor, that methought it might have reached,
at least, a little way into the eternal sphere. Finally,
with the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the
great chair, and were startled, apparently, to find it soar
upward, as if lighter than the air through which it rose.
But the Veiled Lady remained seated and motionless,
with a composure that was hardly less than awful,
because implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her
and these rude persecutors.
“These efforts are wholly without avail,” observed the
Professor, who had been looking on with an aspect of
serene indifference. “The roar of a battery of cannon
would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady. And yet, were
I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the
desert wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia;
the icebergs grinding one against the other in the polar
seas; the rustle of a leaf in an East Indian forest; the
lowest whispered breath of the bashfulest maiden in the
world, uttering the first confession of her love. Nor does
there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own
arise out of that chair.”
Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just
as he spoke these words, the Veiled Lady arose. There
was a mysterious tremor that shook the magic veil. The
spectators, it may be, imagined that she was about to
take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society
of those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned
her so near akin. Hollingsworth, a moment ago,
had mounted the platform, and now stood gazing at the
figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole
power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.
“Come,” said he, waving his hand towards her. “You
are safe!”
She threw off the veil, and stood before that multitude
of people pale, tremulous, shrinking, as if only then had
she discovered that a thousand eyes were gazing at her.
Poor maiden! How strangely had she been betrayed!
Blazoned abroad as a wonder of the world, and performing
what were adjudged as miracles, — in the faith of
many, a seeress and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment
of others, a mountebank, — she had kept, as I
religiously believe, her virgin reserve and sanctity of
soul throughout it all. Within that encircling veil,
though an evil hand had flung it over her, there was as
deep a seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the
while, been sitting under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit,
in the Blithedale woods, at the feet of him who now
summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the true
heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for
the jugglery that had hitherto environed her. She
uttered a shriek, and fled to Hollingsworth, like one
escaping from her deadliest enemy, and was safe forever!
| XXIII.
A VILLAGE-HALL. The Blithedale romance | |