Chương Chương 22 · 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 bygone 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 in a few brief and

pungent squibs, such as the newspapers 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 reaccustom 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 snatched a glimpse at England, and been

back again. 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 manikins 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, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld 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 meeting-house 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

shop-keeper,--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 delicacy of the physical

constitution. Of all these 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 awhile 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, melodramatic 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 settled grief was but a shadow

beneath the influence of 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

jew's-harps,--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 into

the same range with beings whom death, in 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 time,

in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in 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 of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so

that 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 exhibitor 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

bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her

love. Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own

behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or 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.

XXIV.