XII COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

XII COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Long since, in this part of our circumjacent wood, I had found out for
myself a little hermitage. It was a kind of leafy cave, high upward into
the air, among the midmost branches of a white-pine tree. A wild
grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted itself
up into the tree, and, after wreathing the entanglement of its tendrils
around almost every bough, had caught hold of three or four neighboring
trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable knot of
polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from a summer shower, the fancy
had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly impervious mass of foliage.
The branches yielded me a passage, and closed again beneath, as if only
a squirrel or a bird had passed. Far aloft, around the stem of the
central pine, behold a perfect nest for Robinson Crusoe or King Charles!
A hollow chamber of rare seclusion had been formed by the decay of some
of the pine branches, which the vine had lovingly strangled with its
embrace, burying them from the light of day in an aerial sepulchre of its
own leaves. It cost me but little ingenuity to enlarge the interior, and
open loopholes through the verdant walls. Had it ever been my fortune to
spend a honeymoon, I should have thought seriously of inviting my bride
up thither, where our next neighbors would have been two orioles in
another part of the clump.

It was an admirable place to make verses, tuning the rhythm to the breezy
symphony that so often stirred among the vine leaves; or to meditate an
essay for "The Dial," in which the many tongues of Nature whispered
mysteries, and seemed to ask only a little stronger puff of wind to speak
out the solution of its riddle. Being so pervious to air-currents, it
was just the nook, too, for the enjoyment of a cigar. This hermitage was
my one exclusive possession while I counted myself a brother of the
socialists. It symbolized my individuality, and aided me in keeping it
inviolate. None ever found me out in it, except, once, a squirrel. I
brought thither no guest, because, after Hollingsworth failed me, there
was no longer the man alive with whom I could think of sharing all. So
there I used to sit, owl-like, yet not without liberal and hospitable
thoughts. I counted the innumerable clusters of my vine, and
fore-reckoned the abundance of my vintage. It gladdened me to anticipate
the surprise of the Community, when, like an allegorical figure of rich
October, I should make my appearance, with shoulders bent beneath the
burden of ripe grapes, and some of the crushed ones crimsoning my brow as
with, a bloodstain.

Ascending into this natural turret, I peeped in turn out of several of
its small windows. The pine-tree, being ancient, rose high above the rest
of the wood, which was of comparatively recent growth. Even where I sat,
about midway between the root and the topmost bough, my position was
lofty enough to serve as an observatory, not for starry investigations,
but for those sublunary matters in which lay a lore as infinite as that
of the planets. Through one loophole I saw the river lapsing calmly
onward, while in the meadow, near its brink, a few of the brethren were
digging peat for our winter's fuel. On the interior cart-road of our
farm I discerned Hollingsworth, with a yoke of oxen hitched to a drag of
stones, that were to be piled into a fence, on which we employed
ourselves at the odd intervals of other labor. The harsh tones of his
voice, shouting to the sluggish steers, made me sensible, even at such a
distance, that he was ill at ease, and that the balked philanthropist had
the battle-spirit in his heart.

"Haw, Buck!" quoth he. "Come along there, ye lazy ones! What are ye
about, now? Gee!"

"Mankind, in Hollingsworth's opinion," thought I, "is but another yoke of
oxen, as stubborn, stupid, and sluggish as our old Brown and Bright. He
vituperates us aloud, and curses us in his heart, and will begin to prick
us with the goad-stick, by and by. But are we his oxen? And what right
has he to be the driver? And why, when there is enough else to do,
should we waste our strength in dragging home the ponderous load of his
philanthropic absurdities? At my height above the earth, the whole
matter looks ridiculous!"

Turning towards the farmhouse, I saw Priscilla (for, though a great way
off, the eye of faith assured me that it was she) sitting at Zenobia's
window, and making little purses, I suppose; or, perhaps, mending the
Community's old linen. A bird flew past my tree; and, as it clove its way
onward into the sunny atmosphere, I flung it a message for Priscilla.

"Tell her," said I, "that her fragile thread of life has inextricably
knotted itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it will be
broken. Tell her that Zenobia will not be long her friend. Say that
Hollingsworth's heart is on fire with his own purpose, but icy for all
human affection; and that, if she has given him her love, it is like
casting a flower into a sepulchre. And say that if any mortal really
cares for her, it is myself; and not even I for her realities,--poor
little seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her!--but for the fancy-work
with which I have idly decked her out!"

The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my
nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche. Many trees mingled
their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor. Possibly there was a sensual
influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It may have
been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood
of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of
attempting to benefit the world. Our especial scheme of reform, which,
from my observatory, I could take in with the bodily eye, looked so
ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh aloud.

"But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I. "If I were wise, I
should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my
companions for remaining in it."

While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in the
wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the
disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt. It brought my
thoughts back to our recent interview. I recognized as chiefly due to
this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had
filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better purposes. And it
was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at
Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the noble
earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at Priscilla, whose
impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty. The
essential charm of each had vanished. There are some spheres the contact
with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the
beautiful. It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and little
impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such intercourse, and
not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the Professor's tone represented
that of worldly society at large, where a cold scepticism smothers what
it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. I
detested this kind of man; and all the more because a part of my own
nature showed itself responsive to him.

Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay in
the vicinity of my tree. Soon I caught glimpses of two figures

--a woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together
as they advanced.

Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while, a
flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their light
sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle from some
bright object on the ground. Her gestures were free, and strikingly
impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate intensity, which
I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty culminated. Any
passion would have become her well; and passionate love, perhaps, the
best of all. This was not love, but anger, largely intermixed with scorn.
Yet the idea strangely forced itself upon me, that there was a sort of
familiarity between these two companions, necessarily the result of an
intimate love,--on Zenobia's part, at least,--in days gone by, but which
had prolonged itself into as intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As
they passed among the trees, reckless as her movement was, she took good
heed that even the hem of her garment should not brush against the
stranger's person. I wondered whether there had always been a chasm,
guarded so religiously, betwixt these two.

As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion
than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have been
absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity, tinctured
strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his intellectual
perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed to comprehend,
and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia should put herself
into such a fume; but satisfied his mind that it was all folly, and only
another shape of a woman's manifold absurdity, which men can never
understand. How many a woman's evil fate has yoked her with a man like
this! Nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably incomplete on
the emotional side, with hardly any sensibilities except what pertain to
us as animals. No passion, save of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor
the delicacy that results from this. Externally they bear a close
resemblance to other men, and have perhaps all save the finest grace; but
when a woman wrecks herself on such a being, she ultimately finds that
the real womanhood within her has no corresponding part in him. Her
deepest voice lacks a response; the deeper her cry, the more dead his
silence. The fault may be none of his; he cannot give her what never
lived within his soul. But the wretchedness on her side, and the moral
deterioration attendant on a false and shallow life, without strength
enough to keep itself sweet, are among the most pitiable wrongs that
mortals suffer.

Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and woman,
--outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering like two lovers in the wood,
--I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might have
fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her passionate
womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake, here had ensued
the character of eccentricity and defiance which distinguished the more
public portion of her life.

Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I began to think it the
design of fate to let me into all Zenobia's secrets, and that therefore
the couple would sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a conversation
Which would leave me nothing to inquire. No doubt, however, had it so
happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a
listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by
sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one of
the trees of Dante's ghostly forest. But real life never arranges itself
exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit down at all.
Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree, Zenobia's utterance
was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so cool and low, that I hardly
could make out an intelligible sentence on either side. What I seem to
remember, I yet suspect, may have been patched together by my fancy, in
brooding over the matter afterwards.

"Why not fling the girl off," said Westervelt, "and let her go?"

"She clung to me from the first," replied Zenobia. "I neither know nor
care what it is in me that so attaches her. But she loves me, and I will
not fail her."

"She will plague you, then," said he, "in more ways than one."

"The poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia. "She can do me neither good nor
harm. How should she?"

I know not what reply Westervelt whispered; nor did Zenobia's subsequent
exclamation give me any clew, except that it evidently inspired her with
horror and disgust.

"With what kind of a being am I linked?" cried she. "If my Creator cares
aught for my soul, let him release me from this miserable bond!"

"I did not think it weighed so heavily," said her companion..

"Nevertheless," answered Zenobia, "it will strangle me at last!"

And then I heard her utter a helpless sort of moan; a sound which,
struggling out of the heart of a person of her pride and strength,
affected me more than if she had made the wood dolorously vocal with a
thousand shrieks and wails.

Other mysterious words, besides what are above written, they spoke
together; but I understood no more, and even question whether I fairly
understood so much as this. By long brooding over our recollections, we
subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable
of being distinguished from it. In a few moments they were completely
beyond ear-shot. A breeze stirred after them, and awoke the leafy
tongues of the surrounding trees, which forthwith began to babble, as if
innumerable gossips had all at once got wind of Zenobia's secret. But,
as the breeze grew stronger, its voice among the branches was as if it
said, "Hush! Hush!" and I resolved that to no mortal would I disclose
what I had heard. And, though there might be room for casuistry, such, I
conceive, is the most equitable rule in all similar conjunctures.