V UNTIL BEDTIME

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

V UNTIL BEDTIME, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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!