Bab Bab 4 · UNTIL BEDTIME

Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his

coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a

lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in

order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own

phrase, "something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may imply)

at the shoemaking business. We heard the tap of his hammer at

intervals for the rest of the evening. The remainder of the party

adjourned to the sitting-room. Good Mrs. Foster took her

knitting-work, and soon fell fast asleep, still keeping her needles in

brisk movement, and, to the best of my observation, absolutely footing

a stocking out of the texture of a dream. And a very substantial

stocking it seemed to be. One of the two handmaidens hemmed a towel,

and the other appeared to be making a ruffle, for her Sunday's wear,

out of a little bit of embroidered muslin which Zenobia had probably

given her.

It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our poor

Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia's protection. She

sat beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with an

expression of humble delight at her new friend's beauty. A brilliant

woman is often an object of the devoted admiration--it might almost be

termed worship, or idolatry--of some young girl, who perhaps beholds

the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as little hope of

personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of heaven. We men

are too gross to comprehend it. Even a woman, of mature age, despises

or laughs at such a passion. There occurred to me no mode of

accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by supposing that she had

read some of Zenobia's stories (as such literature goes everywhere), or

her tracts in defence of the sex, and had come hither with the one

purpose of being her slave. There is nothing parallel to this, I

believe,--nothing so foolishly disinterested, and hardly anything so

beautiful,--in the masculine nature, at whatever epoch of life; or, if

there be, a fine and rare development of character might reasonably be

looked for from the youth who should prove himself capable of such

self-forgetful affection.

Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an

undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.

"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she in

the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It is a

grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the

startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight

Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the

stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold

water and give me my death with a pair of wet slippers! And when the

verses are written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you

with my idea as to what the girl really is."

"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."

"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress

from the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose than

to do my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly expect to

make my dresses."

"How can you decide upon her so easily?" I inquired.

"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness of

masculine perceptions!" said Zenobia. "There is no proof which you

would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip of

her forefinger. Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her

paleness, her nervousness, and her wretched fragility. Poor thing! She

has been stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small, close

room, and has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins, candy, and

all such trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so, as she has

hardly any physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may be allowed to

think her spiritual."

"Look at her now!" whispered I.

Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her wan

face and great tears running down her cheeks. It was difficult to

resist the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our voices,

she must have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's scornful estimate

of her character and purposes.

"What ears the girl must have!" whispered Zenobia, with a look of

vexation, partly comic and partly real. "I will confess to you that I

cannot quite make her out. However, I am positively not an ill-natured

person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you, and

especially Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd

creature, and as she knocks with a very slight tap against my own heart

likewise,--why, I mean to let her in. From this moment I will be

reasonably kind to her. There is no pleasure in tormenting a person of

one's own sex, even if she do favor one with a little more love than

one can conveniently dispose of; and that, let me say, Mr. Coverdale,

is the most troublesome offence you can offer to a woman."

"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."

She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy

finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.

The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up

beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla

had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her

place. This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently

received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from her, whatever

the unuttered boon might be. From that instant, too, she melted in

quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element. Though always

an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme of frequent

discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth fixed. We no more

thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had been recognized as a

domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic fireside of old, before we

had ever been warmed by its blaze.

She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little

wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded

to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk

purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses

before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their peculiar excellence,

besides the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the

almost impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the

aperture; although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as

charity or prodigality might wish. I wondered if it were not a symbol

of Priscilla's own mystery.

Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,

our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the strong

puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken

frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to

inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some

unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She had been bred up, no

doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the

city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter

down the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the

casement of her little room. The sense of vast, undefined space,

pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained

windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the

narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements

glimmering across the street. The house probably seemed to her adrift

on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all

that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness

that really exists in its limitless extent. Once, while the blast was

bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of

one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably

reluctant to obey the call.

We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly said

a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then,

indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his

meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply

possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and

mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the

intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent

sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a circumstance that

seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence that he awarded to

them. His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our

socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most

people thought it, impracticable plan, for the reformation of criminals

through an appeal to their higher instincts.

Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him

on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the

subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and

examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.

The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our

infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more

difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was

neither good nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of

the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the

aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local

appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and

interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of

very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested "Sunny

Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better system of society.

This we turned over and over for a while, acknowledging its prettiness,

but concluded it to be rather too fine and sentimental a name (a fault

inevitable by literary ladies in such attempts) for sunburnt men to

work under. I ventured to whisper "Utopia," which, however, was

unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly maltreated, as

if he had intended a latent satire. Some were for calling our

institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one green spot in the

moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted on a proviso for

reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end, when a final decision

might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or "Sahara." So, at last,

finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we resolved

that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good augury

enough.

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through

the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence,

close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the

prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By and by the door was opened by

Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow

candle in his hand.

"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,

bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can. I shall sound the

horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to

milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."

Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my

fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been

growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous

cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit

subject for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one. During the

greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea

remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable

other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant

transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that

night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have

anticipated several of the chief incidents of this narrative, including

a dim shadow of its catastrophe. Starting up in bed at length, I saw

that the storm was past, and the moon was shining on the snowy

landscape, which looked like a lifeless copy of the world in marble.

From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the

moonlight, came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven

swiftly by the wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing

amid tufts of leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side, until

it swept across our doorstep.

How cold an Arcadia was this!

VI.