XXIV THE MASQUERADERS

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

XXIV THE MASQUERADERS, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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 whitepine 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.