VI COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

VI COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us, harsh,
uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as if this
hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.

On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the brethren
of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves into their
habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin the reformation
of the world. Zenobia put her head into the entry, and besought Silas
Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough to leave an armful of
firewood and a pail of water at her chamber door. Of the whole household,
--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla, for whose habits, in this particular,
I cannot vouch,--of all our apostolic society, whose mission was to
bless mankind, Hollingsworth, I apprehend, was the only one who began the
enterprise with prayer. My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned
from his, the solemn murmur of his voice made its way to my ears,
compelling me to be an auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator. It
affected me with a deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity
then existing, or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor
my subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits
(except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked
out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine
interview from which he passes into his daily life.

As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward, cursing
my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was, the hot-house
warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I indulged
myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system; and the
wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general chill of our
airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the marrow of my
bones. In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish as it may
appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a
century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my
intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society
than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant
bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the
bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals;
my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of my own
contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture gallery; my
noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession
of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which I shared; my
dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at command, and could
banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott when the Devil fed him
from the king of France's kitchen; my evening at the billiard club, the
concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could
be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil
amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke
of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of
my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth,

into whose vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to
have a fever and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?

In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into the
icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time, when
Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.

"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!
Don't you mean to get up to-day?"

"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I ever
rise again!"

"What is the matter now?" he asked.

I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in a
close carriage.

"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."

Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to do
while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A
doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,
in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the
point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a
skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many precious
recollections connected with that fit of sickness.

Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of
the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile
feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind
causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our selfish existence.
The education of Christianity, it is true, the sympathy of a like
experience and the example of women, may soften and, possibly, subvert
this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is originally there, and has
likewise its analogy in the practice of our brute brethren, who hunt the
sick or disabled member of the herd from among them, as an enemy. It is
for this reason that the stricken deer goes apart, and the sick lion
grimly withdraws himself into his den. Except in love, or the
attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we
really have no tenderness. But there was something of the woman moulded
into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it,
as men often are of what is best in them, nor seemed ever to know that
there was such a soft place in his heart. I knew it well, however, at
that time, although afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten. Methought
there could not be two such men alive as Hollingsworth. There never was
any blaze of a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings
and shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those
eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.

Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!
and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably
there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone. How many
men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose for
his deathbed companions! At the crisis of my fever I besought
Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to make
me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the hand, a word, a prayer,
if he thought good to utter it; and that then he should be the witness
how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still impresses me as
almost a matter of regret that I did not die then, when I had tolerably
made up my mind to it; for Hollingsworth would have gone with me to the
hither verge of life, and have sent his friendly and hopeful accents far
over on the other side, while I should be treading the unknown path. Now,
were I to send for him, he would hardly come to my bedside, nor should I
depart the easier for his presence.

"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling. "You
know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal more
desperate than it is."

"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a little
of my customary levity.

"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you fancy
yourself so ready to leave it?"

"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty
verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs, in
our pastoral. It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as viewed
through a mist of fever. But, dear Hollingsworth, your own vocation is
evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and nights in helping
your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying breaths."

"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me fitted
for this awful ministry?"

"By your tenderness," I said. " It seems to me the reflection of God's
own love."

"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully. "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."

"I do not believe it," I replied.

But, in due time, I remembered what he said.

Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so serious as,
in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to consider it. After
so much tragical preparation, it was positively rather mortifying to find
myself on the mending hand.

All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to
the full measure of their capacity. Zenobia brought me my gruel every
day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be
told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my
bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous
throbs to my pulse. Her poor little stories and tracts never half did
justice to her intellect. It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that
drove her to seek development in literature. She was made (among a
thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress. I
recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds. It
startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily
faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy. She made
no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as
with a breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks upon
society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined
to aim directly at that spot. Especially the relation between the sexes
is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her dress
could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence.
The image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the
earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her as the
spectacle of only a few. The stage would have been her proper sphere.
She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit endlessly to
painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter; because the cold
decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost scantiness of drapery,
so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with her material perfection
in its entireness. I know not well how to express that the native glow
of coloring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms,
and what was visible of her full bust,--in a word, her womanliness
incarnated,--compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not
quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion,
no doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.

I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always a
new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be fervid
and spicy. Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to the
preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich beauty of
the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn; so fit,
indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a happy
exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia's head. It
might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves about this
peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and wonderful than if
beheld with temperate eyes. In the height of my illness, as I well
recollect, I went so far as to pronounce it preternatural.

"Zenobia is an enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth. "She is
a sister of the Veiled Lady. That flower in her hair is a talisman. If
you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be transformed into
something else." "What does he say?" asked Zenobia.

"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth. "He
is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being a witch,
and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in your hair."

"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather
compassionately, and taking out the flower. "I scorn to owe anything to
magic. Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it has any
virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a new one
to-morrow. It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my happier days!"

The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight
delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as t continued to know this
remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination, though more
slightly, yet in very much the same way. The reason must have been that,
whether intentionally on her part or not, this favorite ornament was
actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's character.

One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed
myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever been
married. The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by any
circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears. So young as
I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a thousand, there was
certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny already accomplished; the
probability was far greater that her coming years had all life's richest
gifts to bring. If the great event of a woman's existence had been
consummated, the world knew nothing of it, although the world seemed to
know Zenobia well. It was a ridiculous piece of romance, undoubtedly, to
imagine that this beautiful personage, wealthy as she was, and holding a
position that might fairly enough be called distinguished, could have
given herself away so privately, but that some whisper and suspicion, and
by degrees a full understanding of the fact, would eventually be blown
abroad. But then, as I failed not to consider, her original home was at
a distance of many hundred miles. Rumors might fill the social
atmosphere, or might once have filled it, there, which would travel but
slowly, against the wind, towards our Northeastern metropolis, and
perhaps melt into thin air before reaching it.

There was not--and I distinctly repeat it---the slightest foundation in
my knowledge for any surmise of the kind. But there is a species of
intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a fact,
--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system. The soul
gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a vegetable
diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood. Vapors then rise up
to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood, but sometimes
truth. The spheres of our companions have, at such periods, a vastly
greater influence upon our own than when robust health gives us a
repellent and self-defensive energy. Zenobia's sphere, I imagine,
impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed me, during this
period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost perfection
of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was not exactly
maiden-like. What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did? What girl had
ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and inevitable
manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman to whom
wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes I strove to
be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a masculine
grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is often guilty
towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet, liberal, but womanly
frankness of a noble and generous disposition. Still, it was of no avail
to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself. Pertinaciously the thought,
"Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and loved! There is no folded
petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose!
"--irresistibly that thought drove out all other conclusions, as often as
my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of the
point to which it led me.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while she
arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great deal of
eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but never, I think,
to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of favoring me with. I
seem to interest you very much; and yet--or else a woman's instinct is
for once deceived--I cannot reckon you as an admirer. What are you
seeking to discover in me?"

"The mystery of your life," answered I, surprised into the truth by the
unexpectedness of her attack. "And you will never tell me."

She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if
challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her
consciousness.

"I see nothing now," said I, closing my own eyes, "unless it be the face
of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well."

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that
any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away. Otherwise, the
matter could have been no concern of mine. It was purely speculative,
for I should not, under any circumstances, have fallen in love with
Zenobia. The riddle made me so nervous, however, in my sensitive
condition of mind and body, that I most ungratefully began to wish that
she would let me alone. Then, too, her gruel was very wretched stuff,
with almost invariably the smell of pine smoke upon it, like the evil
taste that is said to mix itself up with a witch's best concocted
dainties. Why could not she have allowed one of the other women to take
the gruel in charge? Whatever else might be her gifts, Nature certainly
never intended Zenobia for a cook. Or, if so, she should have meddled
only with the richest and spiciest dishes, and such as are to be tasted
at banquets, between draughts of intoxicating wine.