VII THE CONVALESCENT

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

VII THE CONVALESCENT, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

As soon as my incommodities allowed me to think of past occurrences, I
failed not to inquire what had become of the odd little guest whom
Hollingsworth had been the medium of introducing among us. It now
appeared that poor Priscilla had not so literally fallen out of the
clouds, as we were at first inclined to suppose. A letter, which should
have introduced her, had since been received from one of the city
missionaries, containing a certificate of character and an allusion to
circumstances which, in the writer's judgment, made it especially
desirable that she should find shelter in our Community. There was a
hint, not very intelligible, implying either that Priscilla had recently
escaped from some particular peril or irksomeness of position, or else
that she was still liable to this danger or difficulty, whatever it might
be. We should ill have deserved the reputation of a benevolent
fraternity, had we hesitated to entertain a petitioner in such need, and
so strongly recommended to our kindness; not to mention, moreover, that
the strange maiden had set herself diligently to work, and was doing good
service with her needle. But a slight mist of uncertainty still floated
about Priscilla, and kept her, as yet, from taking a very decided place
among creatures of flesh and blood.

The mysterious attraction, which, from her first entrance on our scene,
she evinced for Zenobia, had lost nothing of its force. I often heard
her footsteps, soft and low, accompanying the light but decided tread of
the latter up the staircase, stealing along the passage-way by her new
friend's side, and pausing while Zenobia entered my chamber.
Occasionally Zenobia would be a little annoyed by Priscilla's too close
attendance. In an authoritative and not very kindly tone, she would
advise her to breathe the pleasant air in a walk, or to go with her work
into the barn, holding out half a promise to come and sit on the hay with
her, when at leisure. Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty requital for
her love. Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with her. For
several minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves retained the
susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low, pleasant murmur
ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained it to be
Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to Hollingsworth. She
talked more largely and freely with him than with Zenobia, towards whom,
indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be confidence as involuntary
affection. I should have thought all the better of my own qualities had
Priscilla marked me out for the third place in her regards. But, though
she appeared to like me tolerably well, I could never flatter myself with
being distinguished by her as Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.

One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my
chamber door. I immediately said, "Come in, Priscilla!" with an acute
sense of the applicant's identity. Nor was I deceived. It was really
Priscilla,--a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone far enough
into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of girlhood), but much
less wan than at my previous view of her, and far better conditioned both
as to health and spirits. As I first saw her, she had reminded me of
plants that one sometimes observes doing their best to vegetate among the
bricks of an enclosed court, where there is scanty soil and never any
sunshine. At present, though with no approach to bloom, there were
indications that the girl had human blood in her veins.

Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of
snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed. She did not seem
bashful, nor anywise embarrassed. My weakly condition, I suppose,
supplied a medium in which she could approach me.

"Do not you need this?" asked she. "I have made it for you." It was a
nightcap!

"My dear Priscilla," said I, smiling, "I never had on a nightcap in my
life! But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that I am a
miserable invalid. How admirably you have done it! No, no; I never can
think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as this, unless it
be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company."

"It is for use, not beauty," answered Priscilla. "I could have
embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased."

While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I
perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting for me
to take. It had arrived from the village post-office that morning. As I
did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she drew it back, and
held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a way that
had probably grown habitual to her. Now, on turning my eyes from the
nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air, though not her
figure, and the expression of her face, but not its features, had a
resemblance to what I had often seen in a friend of mine, one of the most
gifted women of the age. I cannot describe it. The points easiest to
convey to the reader were a certain curve of the shoulders and a partial
closing of the eyes, which seemed to look more penetratingly into my own
eyes, through the narrowed apertures, than if they had been open at full
width. It was a singular anomaly of likeness coexisting with perfect
dissimilitude.

"Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?" said I.

She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite lost the look that
had drawn my notice.

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?" "No,"
she answered.

"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her just now,--and it happens,
strangely enough, that this very letter is from her."

Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.

"I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!" she said rather
petulantly. "How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady merely
by holding her letter in my hand?"

"Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it," I replied; "nor
do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it. It was just a
coincidence, nothing more."

She hastened out of the room, and this was the last that I saw of
Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.

Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr. Emerson's
Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances (lent me by
Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the brethren or
sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little else, most of these
utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel, whose station was
on the outposts of the advance guard of human progression; or sometimes
the voice came sadly from among the shattered ruins of the past, but yet
had a hopeful echo in the future. They were well adapted (better, at
least, than any other intellectual products, the volatile essence of
which had heretofore tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like ourselves,
whose present bivouac was considerably further into the waste of chaos
than any mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before. Fourier's
works, also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a good
deal of my attention, from the analogy which I could not but recognize
between his system and our own. There was far less resemblance, it is
true, than the world chose to imagine, inasmuch as the two theories
differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their main
principles.

I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his benefit,
some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.

"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe shall
arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into a
particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in
Fourier's time. He calls it limonade a cedre. It is positively a fact!
Just imagine the city docks filled, every day, with a flood tide of this
delectable beverage!"

"Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it at once?" asked
Hollingsworth. "The jack-tars would be delighted to go down in ships and
do business in such an element."

I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly could, several
points of Fourier's system, illustrating them with here and there a page
or two, and asking Hollingsworth's opinion as to the expediency of
introducing these beautiful peculiarities into our own practice.

"Let me hear no more of it!" cried he, in utter disgust. "I never will
forgive this fellow! He has committed the unpardonable sin; for what
more monstrous iniquity could the Devil himself contrive than to choose
the selfish principle,--the principle of all human wrong, the very
blackness of man's heart, the portion of ourselves which we shudder at,
and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,--to
choose it as the master workman of his system? To seize upon and foster
whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial, and abominable corruptions
have cankered into our nature, to be the efficient instruments of his
infernal regeneration! And his consummated Paradise, as he pictures it,
would be worthy of the agency which he counts upon for establishing it.
The nauseous villain!"

"Nevertheless," remarked I, "in consideration of the promised delights of
his system,---so very proper, as they certainly are, to be appreciated by
Fourier's countrymen,--I cannot but wonder that universal France did not
adopt his theory at a moment's warning. But is there not something very
characteristic of his nation in Fourier's manner of putting forth his
views? He makes no claim to inspiration. He has not persuaded
himself--as Swedenborg did, and as any other than a Frenchman would, with
a mission of like importance to communicate--that he speaks with
authority from above. He promulgates his system, so far as I can
perceive, entirely on his own responsibility. He has searched out and
discovered the whole counsel of the Almighty in respect to mankind, past,
present, and for exactly seventy thousand years to come, by the mere
force and cunning of his individual intellect!"

"Take the book out of my sight," said Hollingsworth with great virulence
of expression, "or, I tell you fairly, I shall fling it in the fire! And
as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of Gehenna, where, as
I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this moment!"

"And bellowing, I suppose," said I,--not that I felt any ill-will towards
Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to Hollingsworth's
image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved limonade a cedre!"

There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with a
man who allows himself to declaim in this manner; so I dropt the subject,
and never took it up again.

But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any amount
of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I question
whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to receive it. I
began to discern that he had come among us actuated by no real sympathy
with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because we were estranging
ourselves from the world, with which his lonely and exclusive object in
life had already put him at odds. Hollingsworth must have been
originally endowed with a great spirit of benevolence, deep enough and
warm enough to be the source of as much disinterested good as Providence
often allows a human being the privilege of conferring upon his fellows.
This native instinct yet lived within him. I myself had profited by it,
in my necessity. It was seen, too, in his treatment of Priscilla. Such
casual circumstances as were here involved would quicken his divine power
of sympathy, and make him seem, while their influence lasted, the
tenderest man and the truest friend on earth. But by and by you missed
the tenderness of yesterday, and grew drearily conscious that
Hollingsworth had a closer friend than ever you could be; and this friend
was the cold, spectral monster which he had himself conjured up, and on
which he was wasting all the warmth of his heart, and of which, at last,
--as these men of a mighty purpose so invariably do,--he had grown to be
the bond-slave. It was his philanthropic theory.

This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it had
been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his
philanthropy. Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught his
benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so
that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love to
man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments, unless
they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which he mistook
for an angel of God. Had Hollingsworth's education been more enlarged,
he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this pitfall. But this
identical pursuit had educated him. He knew absolutely nothing, except
in a single direction, where he had thought so energetically, and felt to
such a depth, that no doubt the entire reason and justice of the universe
appeared to be concentrated thitherward.

It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life, Hollingsworth
was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people (among whom I include
humorists of every degree), it required all the constancy of friendship
to restrain his associates from pronouncing him an intolerable bore.
Such prolonged fiddling upon one string--such multiform presentation of
one idea! His specific object (of which he made the public more than
sufficiently aware, through the medium of lectures and pamphlets) was to
obtain funds for the construction of an edifice, with a sort of
collegiate endowment. On this foundation he purposed to devote himself
and a few disciples to the reform and mental culture of our criminal
brethren. His visionary edifice was Hollingsworth's one castle in the
air; it was the material type in which his philanthropic dream strove to
embody itself; and he made the scheme more definite, and caught hold of
it the more strongly, and kept his clutch the more pertinaciously, by
rendering it visible to the bodily eye. I have seen him, a hundred times,
with a pencil and sheet of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view,
or the rear of the structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as
lovingly as another man might plan those of the projected home where he
meant to be happy with his wife and children. I have known him to begin
a model of the building with little stones, gathered at the brookside,
whither we had gone to cool ourselves in the sultry noon of hayingtime.
Unlike all other ghosts, his spirit haunted an edifice, which, instead of
being time-worn, and full of storied love, and joy, and sorrow, had never
yet come into existence.

"Dear friend," said I once to Hollingsworth, before leaving my
sick-chamber," I heartily wish that I could make your schemes my schemes,
because it would be so great a happiness to find myself treading the same
path with you. But I am afraid there is not stuff in me stern enough for
a philanthropist,--or not in this peculiar direction,--or, at all events,
not solely in this. Can you bear with me, if such should prove to be the
case?"

"I will at least wait awhile," answered Hollingsworth, gazing at me
sternly and gloomily. "But how can you be my life-long friend, except you
strive with me towards the great object of my life?"

Heaven forgive me! A horrible suspicion crept into my heart, and stung
the very core of it as with the fangs of an adder. I wondered whether it
were possible that Hollingsworth could have watched by my bedside, with
all that devoted care, only for the ulterior purpose of making me a
proselyte to his views!