Chương Chương 23 · THE MASQUERADERS

Two nights had passed since the foregoing occurrences, when, in a

breezy September forenoon, I set forth from town, on foot, towards

Blithedale. It was the most delightful of all days for a walk, with a

dash of invigorating ice-temper in the air, but a coolness that soon

gave place to the brisk glow of exercise, while the vigor remained as

elastic as before. The atmosphere had a spirit and sparkle in it.

Each breath was like a sip of ethereal wine, tempered, as I said, with

a crystal lump of ice. I had started on this expedition in an

exceedingly sombre mood, as well befitted one who found himself tending

towards home, but was conscious that nobody would be quite overjoyed to

greet him there. My feet were hardly off the pavement, however, when

this morbid sensation began to yield to the lively influences of air

and motion. Nor had I gone far, with fields yet green on either side,

before my step became as swift and light as if Hollingsworth were

waiting to exchange a friendly hand-grip, and Zenobia's and Priscilla's

open arms would welcome the wanderer's reappearance. It has happened

to me on other occasions, as well as this, to prove how a state of

physical well-being can create a kind of joy, in spite of the

profoundest anxiety of mind.

The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny freshness,

through my memory. I know not why it should be so. But my mental eye

can even now discern the September grass, bordering the pleasant

roadside with a brighter verdure than while the summer heats were

scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green, although here and there a

branch or shrub has donned its vesture of crimson and gold a week or

two before its fellows. I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their

small clusters of scarlet fruit; the toadstools, likewise,--some

spotlessly white, others yellow or red,--mysterious growths, springing

suddenly from no root or seed, and growing nobody can tell how or

wherefore. In this respect they resembled many of the emotions in my

breast. And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear, and bright,

that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean rocks, and

deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish were darting to and fro, and

within which lurked the hermit frog. But no,--I never can account for

it, that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story,

and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose, I should examine

these things so like a peaceful-bosomed naturalist. Nor why, amid all

my sympathies and fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration

through my frame.

Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that

Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of

ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,

and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond

the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! They glided

mistily before me, as I walked. Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed

with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had

given up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine. What had I

ever had to do with them? And why, being now free, should I take this

thraldom on me once again? It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered

to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors,

and the misfortunes of individuals who stood within a circle of their

own, into which, if I stept at all, it must be as an intruder, and at a

peril that I could not estimate.

Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept

alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy. I indulged in a

hundred odd and extravagant conjectures. Either there was no such

place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of

thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it

was all changed during my absence. It had been nothing but dream work

and enchantment. I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse, and for

the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian

corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I had imagined.

It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness.

These vagaries were of the spectral throng so apt to steal out of an

unquiet heart. They partly ceased to haunt me, on my arriving at a

point whence, through the trees, I began to catch glimpses of the

Blithedale farm. That surely was something real. There was hardly a

square foot of all those acres on which I had not trodden heavily, in

one or another kind of toil. The curse of Adam's posterity--and, curse

or blessing be it, it gives substance to the life around us--had first

come upon me there. In the sweat of my brow I had there earned bread

and eaten it, and so established my claim to be on earth, and my

fellowship with all the sons of labor. I could have knelt down, and

have laid my breast against that soil. The red clay of which my frame

was moulded seemed nearer akin to those crumbling furrows than to any

other portion of the world's dust. There was my home, and there might

be my grave.

I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of

presenting myself before my old associates, without first ascertaining

the state in which they were. A nameless foreboding weighed upon me.

Perhaps, should I know all the circumstances that had occurred, I might

find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen, and never

look at Blithedale more. Had it been evening, I would have stolen

softly to some lighted window of the old farmhouse, and peeped darkling

in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board. Then,

were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the door, glide

in, and take my place among them, without a word. My entrance might be

so quiet, my aspect so familiar, that they would forget how long I had

been away, and suffer me to melt into the scene, as a wreath of vapor

melts into a larger cloud. I dreaded a boisterous greeting. Beholding

me at table, Zenobia, as a matter of course, would send me a cup of

tea, and Hollingsworth fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy,

and Priscilla, in her quiet way, would hand the cream, and others help

me to the bread and butter. Being one of them again, the knowledge of

what had happened would come to me without a shock. For still, at

every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face

that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.

Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the woods,

resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily as the

wild Indian before he makes his onset. I would go wandering about the

outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary

acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of the trees (a

kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant, like myself),

and entreat him to tell me how all things were.

The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up

beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who

chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough. I trod along by the

dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one of

its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the barkless

stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting itself to my

fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was, and if any

overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and

if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the

skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth,

clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old

despair. So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that

I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks, which

were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each a bright

streak over the black surface. By and by, I came to my hermitage, in

the heart of the white-pine tree, and clambering up into it, sat down

to rest. The grapes, which I had watched throughout the summer, now

dangled around me in abundant clusters of the deepest purple,

deliciously sweet to the taste, and, though wild, yet free from that

ungentle flavor which distinguishes nearly all our native and

uncultivated grapes. Methought a wine might be pressed out of them

possessing a passionate zest, and endowed with a new kind of

intoxicating quality, attended with such bacchanalian ecstasies as the

tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and the Rhine are inadequate to

produce. And I longed to quaff a great goblet of it that moment!

While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out of the peep-holes

of my hermitage, and saw the farmhouse, the fields, and almost every

part of our domain, but not a single human figure in the landscape.

Some of the windows of the house were open, but with no more signs of

life than in a dead man's unshut eyes. The barn-door was ajar, and

swinging in the breeze. The big old dog,--he was a relic of the former

dynasty of the farm,--that hardly ever stirred out of the yard, was

nowhere to be seen. What, then, had become of all the fraternity and

sisterhood? Curious to ascertain this point, I let myself down out of

the tree, and going to the edge of the wood, was glad to perceive our

herd of cows chewing the cud or grazing not far off. I fancied, by

their manner, that two or three of them recognized me (as, indeed, they

ought, for I had milked them and been their chamberlain times without

number); but, after staring me in the face a little while, they

phlegmatically began grazing and chewing their cuds again. Then I grew

foolishly angry at so cold a reception, and flung some rotten fragments

of an old stump at these unsentimental cows.

Skirting farther round the pasture, I heard voices and much laughter

proceeding from the interior of the wood. Voices, male and feminine;

laughter, not only of fresh young throats, but the bass of grown

people, as if solemn organ-pipes should pour out airs of merriment. Not

a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a laugh, but its

cadences were familiar. The wood, in this portion of it, seemed as

full of jollity as if Comus and his crew were holding their revels in

one of its usually lonesome glades. Stealing onward as far as I durst,

without hazard of discovery, I saw a concourse of strange figures

beneath the overshadowing branches. They appeared, and vanished, and

came again, confusedly with the streaks of sunlight glimmering down

upon them.

Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers, and war-paint,

and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his woodland

bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended

by our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound. Drawing an arrow

from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture, and hit the very tree

behind which I happened to be lurking. Another group consisted of a

Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two

foresters of the Middle Ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed

hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder, quaint,

demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted. Shepherds of Arcadia, and

allegoric figures from the "Faerie Queen," were oddly mixed up with

these. Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange

discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary

officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and queues longer than their

swords. A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little gypsy,

with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another, telling

fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old witch of

Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the midst, as

if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of her

necromantic art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near by,

in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did more to

disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee

observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in

the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.

A little farther off, some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with

portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn

earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized

the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and

summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the

festal cheer. So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so

swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic

music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together, and

they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one's brain

with merely looking at it. Anon they stopt all of a sudden, and

staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of laughter; whereat a

shower of the September leaves (which, all day long, had been

hesitating whether to fall or no) were shaken off by the movement of

the air, and came eddying down upon the revellers.

Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence, at the deepest point of

which, tickled by the oddity of surprising my grave associates in this

masquerading trim, I could not possibly refrain from a burst of

laughter on my own separate account.

"Hush!" I heard the pretty gypsy fortuneteller say. "Who is that

laughing?"

"Some profane intruder!" said the goddess Diana. "I shall send an

arrow through his heart, or change him into a stag, as I did Actaeon,

if he peeps from behind the trees!"

"Me take his scalp!" cried the Indian chief, brandishing his tomahawk,

and cutting a great caper in the air.

"I'll root him in the earth with a spell that I have at my tongue's

end!" squeaked Moll Pitcher. "And the green moss shall grow all over

him, before he gets free again!"

"The voice was Miles Coverdale's," said the fiendish fiddler, with a

whisk of his tail and a toss of his horns. "My music has brought him

hither. He is always ready to dance to the Devil's tune!"

Thus put on the right track, they all recognized the voice at once, and

set up a simultaneous shout.

"Miles! Miles! Miles Coverdale, where are you?" they cried. "Zenobia!

Queen Zenobia! here is one of your vassals lurking in the wood.

Command him to approach and pay his duty!"

The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in pursuit of me, so

that I was like a mad poet hunted by chimeras. Having fairly the start

of them, however, I succeeded in making my escape, and soon left their

merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear. Its fainter tones

assumed a kind of mournfulness, and were finally lost in the hush and

solemnity of the wood. In my haste, I stumbled over a heap of logs and

sticks that had been cut for firewood, a great while ago, by some

former possessor of the soil, and piled up square, in order to be

carted or sledded away to the farmhouse. But, being forgotten, they

had lain there perhaps fifty years, and possibly much longer; until, by

the accumulation of moss, and the leaves falling over them, and

decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound was formed, in

which the softened outline of the woodpile was still perceptible. In

the fitful mood that then swayed my mind, I found something strangely

affecting in this simple circumstance. I imagined the long-dead

woodman, and his long-dead wife and children, coming out of their chill

graves, and essaying to make a fire with this heap of mossy fuel!

From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie, and neither

knew nor cared whither I was going, until a low, soft, well-remembered

voice spoke, at a little distance.

"There is Mr. Coverdale!"

"Miles Coverdale!" said another voice,--and its tones were very stern.

"Let him come forward, then!"

"Yes, Mr. Coverdale," cried a woman's voice,--clear and melodious, but,

just then, with something unnatural in its chord,--"you are welcome!

But you come half an hour too late, and have missed a scene which you

would have enjoyed!"

I looked up and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at the base of which

sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at his feet and Zenobia standing

before them.

XXV.