_ 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 haying-time. 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! _