^-: ,<55 -^i- ^ ^-v:- ^ N*^^
o 0
'>.%
|
■^^ |
^^^- |
A |
|
|
% |
^0, |
, v-* |
■^^ |
|
f |
^A |
.^^ |
|
|
o |
K^ |
O^ |
|
|
> |
|||
|
' ^'^ |
f^. |
||
|
.0- |
'O |
||
|
0^ |
,, ^ |
' " / |
'^c |
%<^' ~<^^ '^^.
O "/
>%-^X
7 V
nS -^i
■^.c^
0-^^-"
0. x-^ .\^
>,
..-^
cj,\ .ON ..
iO'
.0-^^ --
%.<-' A^^' ^^-
OO'
,0^
■i' ■^.
,0^
<\>' <^^ .\^^ -^C.
\ I « i -^^
V--
,0 o.
• ^Vvr^^ ^>
0 ,".7^ ^"\^
o^
\d^
' " " /^ o
.0
\^-
; ■^^•\^
.,^^ '^.,
.o
V I «
^ * 0 s o ' ^0-
^'^
■V
.0^
O 0
= T
:\ '
-v.. . -^
V- ,<3 a «, -f^.
.^' cJ-.^. '"'^ .* O'^ "6 ^v"^. .^'o^
■"=.0^
,^^ -^c.^
,v
^0-
' %. 'I.
-^ .<^
•'oo^
^y- V
■s.
■ ^ ' 1
-/ -f--
.0-
'"c-
'V
^ ■» O o V - .\^ -. ^. %,
iX-
xV .A
•/>-
K°^X.
•>:■
■>-^^\
^^;
c. \^i^^O- .,^- c.^ . , .,
^ o>-
V. ^^,
\0
.\^^^' "^>
tX
.V -Si,
,.o-
,.. ^ /"^
■^•
\'
v^-
|
'^. |
<i^'' . |
|
|
(1 >• |
' r. ■^.- .V, * ^
,^-^-
.0 o^
•^> .^
.0-
.-. s ^' o>
S' <So
<S'
,0 o
o-^ •7-.
,0 o^
''■'jje c vx
THE SCARLET LETTER.
THE
SCARLET LETTER
/
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
JKUusttatcd.
BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 1878.
^
Copyright, 1850 and 1877. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE and JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.
All rights reserved.
October 22, 1874.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
!|UCH to the author's surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, introductory to The Scarlet Letter, has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it, the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a
iv PREFACE.
purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it appears to him, that the only remarkable fea- tures of the sketch are its frank and genuine good- humor, and .the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or political, he utterly disclaims such motives. The sketch might, perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or detriment to the book ; but, having undertaken to write it, he con- ceives that it could not have been done in a better or a kindlier spirit, nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of truth.
The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory sketch without the change of a word.
Salem, March 30, 1850.
CONTENTS.
Page
The Custom-House. — Introductory . . . . . 1
THE SCARLET LETTER.
I. The Prison-Door 51
IL The Market-Place 54
in. The Recognition 68
IV. The Interview 80
V. Hester at her Needle 90
VL Pearl 104
VII. The Governor's Hall 118
VIII. The Elf-Child and the Minister . . . 129
IX. The Leech . " .142
X. The Leech and his Patient . . . . 155
XL The Interior of a Heart 168
XIL The Minister's Vigil 177
XIII. Another View of Hester ..... 193
XIV. Hester and the Physician ..... 204
vi CONTENTS.
XV. Hester and Peakl 212
XVI. A Forest Walk 223
XVII. The Pastor and his Parishioner . . . 231
XVIII. A Flood of Sunshine 245
XIX. The Child at the Brook-side .... 253
XX. The Minister in a Maze 264
XXI. The New England Holiday 277
XXII. The Procession 288
XXIII. The Eevelation of the Scarlet Letter . . 302
XXIV. Conclusion 315
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Brawn hy Mary Hallock Foote and Engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. ornamental head-pieces are bij L. S. Ipsen.
The
Pare
The Custom-House 1
The Prison Door 49
Vignette, — Wild Rose 51
The Gossips 57
" Standing on the Miserable Eminence " 65
"She was led back to Prison" 78
"The Eyes of the wrinkled Scholar glowed" .... 87
The Lonesome Dwelling 93
Lonely Pootsteps 99
Vignette 104
A touch of Pearl's baby-hand 113
Vignette 118
The Governor's Breastplate 125
" Look thou to it ! I will not lose the child ! " . . . 135
The Minister and Leech 148
The Leech and his Patient 165
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
The ViiiGiNS of the Chukch 172
"They stood in the noox or that strange splendor" . . 185
Hester in the House of Mourning 195
Mandrake 211
"He gathered herbs here and there" 213
Pearl on the Sea-Shore 217
" Wilt thou yet forgive me ? " 237
A Gleam of Sunshine 249
The Child at the Brook-Side 257
Chillingworth, — " Smile with a sinister meaning " . . . 287
New England Worthies 289
" Shall we not meet again ? " 311
Hester's Return 320
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.
INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER."
T is a little remarkable, that — though disin- V clined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs tl^ at the fireside, and to my personal friends — an ^ autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. Tlie first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader — inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine — with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now — because, be- yond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion — I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The
2 THE SCARLET LETTER.
example of the famous "P. P., Clerk of this Parish/-' was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author ad- dresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or liiVmates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the Avide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into conmiunion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation Avith his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and ajiprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native re- serve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, mcthinks, may be autobio- graphical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as ofi'ering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact, — a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. • 3
most prolix among the tales that make up my volume, — this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. In accoraplishhig the main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint rep- resentation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together witli some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of wluit, half a cen- tury ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustluig wharf, — but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life ; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides ; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood, — at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass, — here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam's government is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a bal- cony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous spe- cimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield
4 THE SCARLET LETTER.
before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of inter- mingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temjier that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, care- ful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many jjeople are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter them- selves under the wing of the federal eagle ; imagining, I ]3re- sume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, — oftener soon than late, — is apt to flhig off her nestlings, with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described edifice — which we may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port — has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there often chances a fore- noon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occa- sions might remind the elderly citizen of that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit her Avharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have arrived at once, — usually from Africa or South America, — or to be on the verge
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 5
of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship- master, just in port, witli his vessels papers under his arm, in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here, likewise, — the genn of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, care-worn merchant, — we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his master^s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic-boats upon a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor in quest of a protection; or the re- cently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying trade.
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would disfcern — in the entry, if it were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms, if wintry or inclement weather — a row of venerable figures, sit- ting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between
G THE SCARLET LETTER.
speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distin- guishes the occupants of ahnshouses, and all other human beings wlio depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else, but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen — seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apos- tolic errands — were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height; with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers; around the doors of Avhich are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse ; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infre- quent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and inlirm ; and — not to forget the library — on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue LaMS. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And here, some six months ago, — pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 7
stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper, — you might have recognized, honored reader, the same individual who wel- comed you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glim- mered so pleasantly through the willow branches, on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go tliither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity, and pockets his emoluments.
This old town of Salem — my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years — possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual resi- dence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty, — its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame, — its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other, — such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The senti- ment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two cen- turies and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emi- grant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest- bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here
8 THE SCARLET LETTER.
his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to liave a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor, — Avho came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace, — a stronger claim than for myself, Avhose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge ; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as -wdtness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too, inherited the perse- cuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyr- dom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stam upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 9
dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust ! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them — as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist — may be now and henceforth removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans Avould have tliought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laud- able; no success of mine — if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success — would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. " A writer of story-books ! What kind of a business in hfe — what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation — may that be? Wliy, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time ! And yet, let tliem scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined them- selves with mine.
Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood.
10 THE SCARLET LETTER.
bj these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two genera- tions, performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk ahnost out of sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each gen- eration, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant — who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came — has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tena- city with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres ; — all these, and what-
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. H
ever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the j)urpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been hi my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here, — ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry- march along the main street, — might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature M'ill not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn- out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It M^as not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away, — as it seemed, permanently, — but yet returned, like the bad half-penny ; or as if Salem were for me the inevi- table centre of the universe. So, one fine morning, I ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my weighty responsibility, as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.
I doubt greatly — or, rather, I do not doubt at all — whether any public functionary of the United States, either in the civil
12 THE SCARLET LETTER.
or military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of vet- erans under his orders as myself. The vs'hereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled, when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent j)osition of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier, — New England's most distinguished soldier, — he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations through which he had held office, he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake. General Miller was radically conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were an- cient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous blasts, had finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, Avith little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presi- dential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of exist- ence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bedridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House, during a large part of the year ; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 13
and convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon afterwards — as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their country's service, as I verily believe it was — withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to me, that, through my interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be sup- posed to fall. Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was Avell for their venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his office with any reference to political services. Had it been otherwise, — had an active politician been put into this influential post, to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his office, — hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life, within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom- House steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the axe of the guil- lotine. It was plain enough to discern, that the old felloAvs dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent; to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance of so harmless an
U THE SCARLET LETTER.
individual as myself; to detect, as one or another addressed me, the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days, had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all established rule, — and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for business, — they ought to have given j)lace to younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I knew it too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the detriment of my official con- science, they continued, during my incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the waU; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one another -with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns among them.
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Sur- veyor had no great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy consciousness of being usefully employed, — in their own behalf, at least, if not for our beloved country, — these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of office. Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels ! Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers ! Whenever such a miscliance occurred, — when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 15
their unsuspicious noses, — nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution, after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy.
Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that wliich usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognize the man. As most of these old Cus- tom-House officers had good traits, and as my position in refer- ence to them, being paternal and protective, was favorable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It Avas pleasant, in the summer forenoons, — when the fer- vent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely communicated a genial warmth to their half-torpid sys- tems, — it was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jolHty of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humor, has little to do with the matter ; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In one case, how- ever, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.
16 THE SCARLET LETTER.
It would be sad injustice^ the reader must understand^ to rep- resent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and depend- ent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be no wrong done, if I characterize them generally as a set of weari- some old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their memories with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of their morning^s breakfast, or yesterday^s, to-day^s, or to-morrow^s dinner, than of the ship- wreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the workVs wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.
The father of the Custom-House — the patriarcli, not only of this little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the re- spectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States — was a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a legiti- mate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or, rather, born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of tlie port, had created an ofiice for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the early ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 17
that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure, smartly arrayed in a bright- buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed — not young, indeed — but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through the Cus- tom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal, — and there was very little else to look at, — he was a most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the dehghts which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibil- ities ; nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been tlie husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had like-
18 THE SCARLET LETTER.
wise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition, through and through, with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector ! One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment, he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant; far readier than the Collector's junior clerk, who, at nineteen years, was much the elder and graver man of the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier curiosity, than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so im- palpable, such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclu- sion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts : and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together, that there was no painful perception of deficiency, but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be difficult — and it was so — to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higlier moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed im- munity from the dreariness and duskiness of age.
One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good din- ners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast-meat was as appetizing as a pickle or
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 19
an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his maw_, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher^s meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminis- cences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual ban- quet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey luider one^s very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still appar- ently as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals Avere continually rising up before him; not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for his former apprecia- tion and seeking to resuscitate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual. A tender-loin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remark- ably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events that brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man^s life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough that the carv- ing-knife would make no impression on its carcass, and it could only be divided with an axe and handsaw.
20 THE SCARLET LETTER.
But it is time to quit this sketch; on Avhich, however^ I should be glad to dwell at considerably more length because^ of all men whom I have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom- Ho use officer. Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to continue in office to the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as good an aijpetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom- House portraits would be strangely incomplete; but which my comparatively few opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western terri- tory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and honorable life. The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened Avith in- firmities which even the martial music of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards lightening. The step Avas palsied now that had been foremost in the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came and went; amid the rustle of pajjers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk of the office ; all which sounds and circumstances
- THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 21
seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into his iimer sphere of contemplation. His counte- nance, in this repose, was mild and kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed out upon his features; proving that there was light within him, and that it was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. When no longer called upon to speak, or listen, either of which opera- tions cost him an evident effort, his face would briefly subside into its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecihty of decaying age. The framework of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumbled into ruin.
To observe and define his character, however, under such dis- advantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, per- chance, the walls may remain almost complete, but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with afPection, — for, slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him; might not improperly be termed so, — I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and he- roic qualities which showed it to be not by a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an
22 THE SCARLET LETTER.
uneasy activity ; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze ; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at the jjeriod of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness,
— roused by a trumpet- j)eal, loud enough to awaken all his energies that were not dead, but only slumbering, — he was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a sick man^s gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment, his demeanor would have still been calm. Such an exhibition, how- ever, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him — as evidently as the inde- structible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga already cited as the most appropriate simile — were the features of stubborn and ponder- ous endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable and unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chip- pewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I know,
— certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 23
of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its triumphant energy ; — but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly^s wing. I have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal.
Many characteristics — and those, too, which contribute not the least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch — must have vanished, or been obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does Nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting, A ray of humor, now and then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to prize gnly the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe.
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while the Surveyor — though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon himself the difficult task of engaging him in con- versation— was fond of standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and touched his own.
24 THE SCARLET LETTER.
It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts, than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade ; the tumult of the battle ; the flour- ish of old, heroic music, heard thirty years before ; — such scenes and sounds, perhaps, wer6 all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and shipmasters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of this commercial and custom-house life kept up its little murmur round about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an old sword — now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright gleam along its blade — would have been, among the inkstands, paper- folders, and mahogany rulers, on the Deputy Collector's desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier, — the man of true and simple energy. It was the recollection of those memorable Avords of his, — "I '11 try. Sir ! " — spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase — which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken — would be the best and fittest of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.
It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with indi- viduals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and Avhose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 25
The accidents of my life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fuhiess and variety than during my con- tinuance in office. There was one man, especially, the observa- tion of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplex- ities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish, as by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity of a per- fectly comjsrehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself ; or, at all events, the main-spring that kept its vari- ously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leadhig reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity, — which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime, — Avould he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as day- light. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect : it was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be other- wise than the main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in the ad-
26 THE SCARLET LETTER.
mmistration of affairs. A stain on his conscience^ as to an}'^- thing that came within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, that an error in the balance of an account or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word, — and it is a rare instance in my life, — I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the situation which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits, and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson^s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulg- ing fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing ; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Long- fellow's hearthstone; — it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector Avas desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether difl'erent qualities, and never murmur at the change.
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little mo-
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 27
ment in my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books ; they were apart from me. Nature, — except it were human nature, — the nature that is developed in earth and sky, M'as, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not with impunity be lived too long; else, it might have made me permanently other than I had been without transform- ing me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisjDer in my ear, that, within no long period, and Avhenever a new change of cus- tom should be essential to my good, a change would come.
Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Eevenue, and, so far as I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those qualities) may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-cap- tains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of
28 THE SCARLET LETTER.
whom was a custom-house officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson — though it may often be a hard one — for a man wlio has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for him- self a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are rec- ognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke ; but, at any rate, I learned it thoroughly : nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown ott' in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer — an excellent follow, who came into office with me and went out only a little later — would often engage me in a discussion about one or the other of his favorite topics. Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector's junior clerk, too — a young gentleman who, it was whispered, occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam's letter-paper with what (at the distance of a fcAV yards) looked very much like poetry — used now and then to speak to me of books, as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.
No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be bla- zoned abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cig;ir-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable mer- chandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the im- post, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of ray existence, so far as a
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 29
name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope, will never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while the thoughts that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again. One of the most remark- able occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to oft'er the public the sketch which I am now writing.
In the second story of the Custom-House there is a large room, in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and plaster. The edifice — origi- nally projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial enter- prise of the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity des- tined never to be realized — contains far more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, ap- pears still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days and weeks and months and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But, then, Avhat reams of other manuscripts — filled not with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts — had gone equally to oblivion ; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and — saddest of all — with-
30 THE SCARLET LETTER.
out purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of the j)en ! Yet not altogether worthless, jDcrhaps, as materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants, — old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon Forrester, and many another magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the aristoc- racy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon as long- established rank.
Prior to the Eevolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the King's officials accompanied the British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me ; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have con- tained many references to forgotten or remembered men, and to anticpie customs, which would have affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a dis- covery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner ; unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of mer- chants, never heard of now on ^Change, nor very readily decipher-
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 31
able on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened^ weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity, — and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither, — I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of an- cient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parch- ment cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his Majesty's Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remember to have read (probably in Felt's Annals) a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little graveyard of St. Peter's Cliurch, during the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, Avas left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some frag- ments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once adorned, Avas in very satisfactory preserva- tion. But, on examining the papers which the parchment com- mission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the frizzled Avig had contained of the venerable skull itself.
33 THE SCARLET LETTER.
Tliey were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or at least written in his private capacity, and appar- ently with his own hand. I could account for their being in- cluded in the heap of Custom-IIouse lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue's death had ha])pened suddenly; and that these papers, which he probably kept in his official desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no jniblic concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.
The ancient Surveyor — being Httlc molested, I suppose, at that early day, with business pertaining to his office — seems to have devoted some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled " Main Street," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be api)lied to purposes equally valu- able, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked uj), so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. IMeanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and competent, to take the unprofitable labor off' my hands. As a final disposition, I contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society.
But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package, was a certain affiiir of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced; so that none, or very
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, 33
littlcj of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth, — for time and wear and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other than a rag, — on careful examination, assumed the sliape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an accu- rate measurement, each limb jjroved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It liad been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and M'ould not be turned aside. Certaiidy, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibili- ties, but evading the analysis of my mhid.
While thus perplexed, — and cogitating, among other hypoth- eses, whether the letter might not have been one of those deco- rations which the white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of Indians, — I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me, — the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word, — it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensa- tion not altogether physical, yet almost so, of burning heat ; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had
34 THE SCARLET LETTER.
hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find, recorded by the old Surveyor's pen, a rea- sonably comi)lete explanation of the whole afPair. Tliere were several foolscap sheets containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ances- tors. She had flourished during the period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all mat- ters, especially those of the heart; by which means, as a person of such propensities inevitably must, she gained from many peo- ple the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled ''The Scarlet Letter ''; and it should be borne carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself, — a most curious relic, — are still in my pos- session, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood as affirming, that, in the dress-
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 35
ing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly or altogether as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hun- dred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig, — Avhich was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave, — had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one Avho had borne his Majesty's com- mission, and Avho was therefore illuminated by a ray of the s])len- dor that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike, alas ! the hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen but majestic figure had imparted to me the scar- let symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred con- sideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him, — who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor, — to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memor- able wig, — " do this, and the profit shall be all your own ! You M'ill shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in muie, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes
36 THE SCARLET LETTER.
an heirloom. But^ I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit which will be rightfully due ! " And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, "I will!'^
On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestoAved much thought. It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a hun- dred-fold repetition, the long extent from the front-door of the Custom- House to the side-entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the "Weigh- ers and Gangers, whose slumbers M^ere disturbed by the unmer- cifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that my sole object — and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could ever put himself into voluntary mo- tion — was, to get an appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a custom-house to the dehcate harvest of fancy and sensibil- ity, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with mis- erable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intel- lectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 37
corpses^ and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. " What have you to do with us ? ^' that expression seemed to say. "The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone ! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your v/ages ! " In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks, and rambles into the country, when- ever— which was seldom and reluctantly — I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same tor- por, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so Avhite upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, — making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, — is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known
38 THE SCARLET LETTER.
apartment ; the chairs^ with each its separate individuality ; the centre-table, sustainhig a work-basket, a volume or two, and an exthiguishcd lamp; the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall ; — all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the uimsual light, that they seem to lose their actual sub- stance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trilling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse ; — whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strange- ness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginaiy may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without afi'righting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that wouUl make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in pro- ducing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unob- trusive tinge throughout the room, Avith a faint ruddiness upon the walls and coiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirit- uality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms M'hich fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold — deep within
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 39
its liaunted verge — the smouldering glow of tlie half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at sucli an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House expe- rience, moonlight and sunsliine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them, — of no great richness or value, but the best I had, — was gone from me.
It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of composition, my faculties would not have been found so point- less and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented my- self M'ith writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to men- tion, since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laugli- ter and admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous coloring which nature taught liim liow to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating the sem- blance of a world out of airy matter, Avhen, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would
40 THE SCARLET LETTER.
have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. Tlie page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and com- monplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the flitthig liour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to tran- scribe it. At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page.
These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of toler- ably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away ; or exhaling, without your con- sciousness, like ether out of a phial ; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 41
long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respect- able personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which — though, I trust, an honest one — is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
An effect — which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position — is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer — fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world — may return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity, — that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost, — he forever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of sup- port external to himself. His pervading and continual hope — a hallucination which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death — is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than anything else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise lie may dream of undertaking. "Why should he toil and moil, and be at so
42 THE SCARLET LETTER.
much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him ? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle^s pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold — meaning no disrespect to the wor- thy old gentleman — has, in this respect, a quality of enchant- ment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly char- acter.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance ! Not that the Sur- veyor brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension, — as it would never be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign, — it Avas my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not,
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 43
in the tedious lapss of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend, — to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities ! But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship — to adopt the tone of " P. P." — was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essential, in order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile administration. His position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the blood- thirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects ! There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency — which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbors — to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If
44 THE SCARLET LETTER.
the guillotine^ as applied to office-holders^ were a literal fact instead of one of the most apt of metaphors^ it is my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were suf- ficiently excited to have chopped off all our lieads^ and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity ! It appears to me — who have been a calm and curious observer^ as well in victory as defeat — that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the prac- tice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see occasion ; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as Avas my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame, that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never.
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 45
I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had sug- gested themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune some- what resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years; a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make room for new ones ; long enough, and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognized by the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs — his tendency to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same household must diverge from one another — had sometimes made it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with
46 THE SCARLET LETTER.
which he had been content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many worthier men were faUing; and, at last, after subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile admin- istration, to be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly one.
Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving^s Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper, and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was again a literary man.
Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr, Surveyor Pue, came into play. Eusty through long idle- ness, some little space was requisite before my intellectual ma- chinery could be brought to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even yet, though my thoughts Avere ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by genial sun- shine ; too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This uncap- tivating eff"ect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in Avhich the story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer^s mind ; for he was happier, while straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since he
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 47
had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals and mag- azines of such antique date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again.* Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the Post- humous Papers of a Decapitated Surveyor; and the sketcli which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, M'ill readily be ex- cused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world ! My blessing on my friends ! My for- giveness to my enemies ! For I am in the realm of quiet !
The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old Inspector, — who, by the by, I regret to say, was over- thrown and killed by a horse, some time ago; else he w^ould certainly have lived forever, — he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside forever. The merchants, — Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt, — these, and many other names, which had such a classic fnmilinrity for my ear six months ago, — these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world, — how little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection ! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon,
* At the time of writing this article the author intended to publish, along with " The Scarlet Letter," several shorter talcs and sketches. These it has been thought advisable to defer.
48
THE SCARLET LETTER.
likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good towns-people will not much regret me; for — though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers — there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.
It may be, however, — 0, transporting and triumphant thought \ — that the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's his- tory, shall point out the locality of The Town Pump!
^ , ' ,• '
I. I k
it \ I I I. . i.
I ^ ■ 1 V )' • *
i I i
•f ^ r f I f r
jj;
4S
iikewise.
'ue tlirough the
around it; as if it
.'crgrowii village in
) p'ople its wooden
ue prolixity
' of my
wn wiu
ry, ;i niiit brooding
n of the real earth.
h only imaginary inh
; Ik its homely lanes, and the u.:
main street. Henceforth it ceases t<;
iile. I am a citizen qf somewhere else. My goou i . u ns-people
will not much regret mej for — though it has been as dear an
object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance
in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode
and burial-place of so many of my forefathers — tAere lias never
been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires,
in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better
amongst other faces; and these familiar "mp^. ;.' reed ! ;ir,11v \w.
haid, will do just as well without me.
It may be, however, — O, transporting and triumphant thought i
— tliat the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes
think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary
^f days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's his-
iTv, sliall iM.nit I'Mt tlie locality of The Town Pump!
The Scarlet Letter
I.
THE PRISON-DOOR.
A THRONG of hcin-dvd nuMi, ill sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, in- termixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of whicli was heavily timbered with oak, and stud- ded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new col- ony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earli- est practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accord- ance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers
52 THE SCARLET LETTER.
of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial- ground, on Isaac Johnson^s lot, and romid about his grave/ which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepul- chres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle- browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much over- grown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil, that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, •nath its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in his- tory; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, — or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, — we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so di- rectly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to
THE PRISON-DOOR.
53
issue from that inauspicious portal^ we could hardly do other- wise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blos- som, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darken- ing close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
II.
THE MARKET-PLACE.
HE grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, ' on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston ; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New Eng- land, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some aAvful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the antici- pated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public senti- me^nt. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Anti- nomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the toMii, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom
THE MARKET-PLACE. 55
the white man^s fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solem- nity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of jjublic discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaff'old. On the other hand, a penalty, Avhich, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punish- ment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impro- priety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations ; for, through- out that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has trans- mitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less
56 THE SCARLET LETTER.
force and solidity^ than her own. The Avomen who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the 2)eriod when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. Thev were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at tlie present day, whether in respect to its jiurport or its volume of tone.
" Goodwives,'"" said a hard-featured dame of fifty, " I '11 tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. AYhat think ye, gossips ? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, w^ould she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded ? Marry, I trow not ! "
" People say,''' said another, " that the Eeverend Master Dimmes- dale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation.""
"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch, — that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. " At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she, — the naughty baggage.
THE MAllKET-PLACE,
57
— little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown ! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever ! "
"Ah, but,-*^ interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding
a child by the hand, " let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart/"
" What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her
gown, or the flesh of her forehead ? " cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. " This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scrip- ture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who liave made it of no eff'ect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray ! "
"Mercy on us, goodwife,"" exclaimed a man in the crowd, " is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a whole-
r>,s 'I'll I*; so A iM;K'r lkttkh,.
sotiic. i'f.w of IJk; giillovvs? Tli;it, is t.lit; liiirdnsl, word jct, ! Ilusli, now, jfossips ! for tlir lock is tuniinu; in tlic prison- door, :ind linn; comes Mistress Prvnnc licrscll'."
'The door of l.lic. y,\\\ hcinu; lliint^' open from williin, (here iip[)(;urcd, in llic lirsl, phicc, like ii hhick sliudow cincM'giiij^ into sunshine, l.lu; grim iind grimly presence of llie town-hciidlc, willi ii sword l)y his si(](!, and his stud' of office in liis liund. This persoiiiige preligured iiiid re|)r(;sent,ed in iiis iispccf I lie whole dismid s(!verily of l.lie I'ln'iliuiic cod)- of l;iw, whi(^h i(. was his business to ;idminislcr in its fniid iind closest ;ippli('iil ion in the olIen(h;r. Stretching forth iJie odiciid sliilf in liis left hiind, Ik; laid ids right n|)on tlu; shoidder of ;i young womjiri, wlioni lie thus drew forward; until, on (he thrcisliold of tin; ])rison-(loor, she re|)elled him, hy an action ni;irked wilh nalnral dignity and force of character, and st,e])ped into the o|)en air, as if hy her own fre(! will. SIk; hore in her arms a. child, a baby of soiiu; three montJis old, who wirdud and tiiriutd aside its little face from the loo vivid light, of day; because its existence, hereto- fore, had bronght it. at^qnainted only with tin; gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksouK! apartment of the prison.
When the young woman — the nu)ther of this r:hil(l — stood fidly r(!vealed before tlu; crowd, it seciined <o be her first im- pidse to clasp the infant closely lo lusr bosom; not so much by an im|)ulse of motherly aHeclion, as that she might thereby con- ceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that on(t token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide; another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glanct; that would not b(! abashed, looked around at her towns-peo|)le and neighbors. On IIk; breast of her gown.
THE MARKET-lMiACK. 51)
ill lino red doth, surroiuKhHl with an cliibonili' (•inbr()i(hTy iiiid i'iuitiistic nourishes of ujold-ihroad, appeared (he lelter A. It was so arlislieally (h)Me, and wilh so nnich IVrlility and _ii;ori^'eous Inxnriance, of fancy, (hat it had all the elleet of a, last and littinff decoration to the apparel wliieh she wore; and which was of a sj)lend()r in a(;eordan(H! with the taste of the ai^e, bnt greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
The young woman was tall, with a (igure of |)erfect elegance on a. large scale. She had dark and abundant, hair, so glossy that it threw oil* the sunshine with a gleam, and a fac-e vvhi(!h, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of comj)lexi()n, had tlu^ impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black vyvs. Slu^ was lady-like, too, after the maniUT of the feminine genlilily of those days; characleri/ed by a certain state and dignity, rather than by tlw^ delicate, evanes- cent, and indeseribabh^ grace, whic^h is now reeogni/ed as its indication. Aiul never had Hester I'rynm^ appeared nu)r(! lady- like, in tJie an(i(|ne interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the jjrison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dinuned and obsc-nred by a disastrons cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, aiul made a halo of the misfortuiu; and igno- miny in which she was (uiveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive! observer, there was something e\(piisilcly jjainful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude; of her spirit, the despc^rate recklessness of her nu)od, by its wild and ])icturesque ])e(adia,rity. I Jut tin; ])oint which drew all eyes, aiul, as it were, traiisligured (Ik^ wearer, —
60 THE SCARLET LETTER.
so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time, — was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, talcing her out of the ordinary relations with human- ity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
" She hath good skill at her needle, that 's certain,^^ remarked one of her female spectators ; " but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it ! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magis- trates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?'^
"It were well,'' muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, *'if we stripped Madam Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter one ! "
" 0, peace, neighbors, peace ! " whispered their youngest com- panion; "do not let her hear yon! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she has felt it in her heart."
The grim beadle now made a gesture ■ndth his staff.
" Make way, ggod people, make way, in the King's name ! " cried he. " Open a passage ; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine ! Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place ! "
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession
THE MARKET-PLACE. 61
of stern-browcd men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious school-boys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the igno- minious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a jour- ney of some length ; for, haughty as her demeanor was, slie perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for tAVo or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizen- ship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It Avas, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was em-
62 THE SCARLET LETTER.
bodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage^ methinks^ against our common nature^ — whatever be the delinquencies of the individual^ — no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne^s instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's shoulders above the street.
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by con- trast, of tliat sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman^s beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-crea- ture, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence.
THE MAEKET-PLACE. 63
without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heart- lessness of another social state, which would find oidy a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town ; all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the inflic- tion of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The unliappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intol- erable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the mul- titude, — each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts, — Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
64 THE SCARLET LETTER.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her ejes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences the most trifling and im- material, passages of infancy and school-days, sjiorts, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of what- ever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy. Stand- ing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half- obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. Slie saw her father's face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the old-fashioned Eliza- bethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gen- tle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own
' m tiiicli sie laBli from h tiiem, like a *• Hermincl, ^% and kpt n stwt of a "iotlier faces wiiiij of tliose liUng aidim* fpotls, cMM inraiSjCame mioBsofvliat- jam pmlj iportance, or all t of lier spirit, gmgoricforis,
rr TO a point
|
ire tml aloD? |
|
ifincT. Stani- |
|
■ native vilka^ |
|
aved house of |
|
etainin? a W- |
|
ien of antife |
|
Islil broir, d |
|
isliioDed*- |
|
of bdfd a'"' |
|
jw,andA |
|
i0eDtofa?en- |
|
,,^ lier offl |
JL i
i A 1 I i i I i
f ^ r f f I r
ich she
jin her
like a
mind,
)d kept
other scenes thai
• f ttiCCS
■ \ tliose nd im- school-days, sports, cliildish uestic traits of her maiden years, came back upon her, intermingled with recollections of what- ever ^\ab gravest in her subs< ' are precisely ..^ ,;,-;,! ... ,,,,,.;!,,.,. . -.-.. ir ," .,.,.,,.ance, or all
:c(;' of !"*'• -■pint,
1 i ' ■■: '
and her patenj; 1 use of
uiug a half-
■■iU6 o.rr the portal, iii I'^Ken of antique
' 'other's face, with its bald brow, and
I flowed over the old-fa?ln'>ned Eliza-
'), with the lool ful and
re in her rememl I which,
iii, hud ^u often laid the it of a gen-
THE MARKET-PLACE. 67
face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been Avont to gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thorouglifares, the tall, gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city ; where a new life had awaited lier, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the towns-people assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynne, — yes, at herself, — who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the let- ter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold-thread, upon her bosom !
Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it Avith her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes ! — these were her realities, — all else had vanished !
III.
THE RECOGNITION.
^^g^^^^^ROM this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved; by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took posses- sion of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native garb, was standing there ; but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time ; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.
He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seem- ingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had
THE RECOGNITION. 69
endeavored to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne, that one of this man's shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it.
At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly, at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instan- taneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.
Then, touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood next to him, he addressed him, in a formal and courteous manner.
" I pray you, good Sir,'^ said he, " who is this woman ? — and wherefore is she here set up to public shame ? "
" You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," an-
70 THE SCARLET LETTER.
swered the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion, "else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's church."
"You say truly,'^ replied the other. "I am a stranger, and have been a wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk, to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be redeemed out of my cap- tivity. "Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's, — have I her name rightly ? — of this woman's offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?-"
" Truly, friend ; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people; as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman. Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam, whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot \nth us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance — "
"Ah! — aha! — I conceive you," said the stranger, with a bitter smile. " So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And who, by your favor. Sir, may be the
THE RECOGNITION. 71
father of yonder babe — it is some three or four months old, I should judge — which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"
"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the towns- man. "Madam Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.'''
" The learned man,''"' observed the stranger, with another smile, '^should come himself, to look into the mystery .'''
"It behooves him well, if he be still in life,'' responded the townsman. "Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall, — and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea, — they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom."
" A Avise sentence ! " remarked the stranger, gravely bowing his head. "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not, at least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be known ! — he will be known ! — he will be known ! "
He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and, whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the crowd.
72 THE SCARLET LETTER.
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal, still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger; so fixed a gaze, that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot, midday sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame ; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant in her arms ; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a matronly veil, at church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, Avith so many betwixt him and her, than to greet him, face to face, they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection should be with- drawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind her, until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.
"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice.
It has already been noticed, that directly over the platform on which Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such pub- lic observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself, Avith four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honor. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on
THE RECOGNITION. 73
his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a gentleman ad- vanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a com- munity, which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development^ not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine institutions. They M^ere, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and disen- tangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale and trembled.
The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Bos- ton, a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the pro- fession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap; while his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were \vinking, like
74 THE SCARLET LETTER.
those of Hester^s infant^ in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portraits whicfi we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.
"■ Hester Prynne,^' said the clergyman, " I have striven with my young brother here, under whose preaching of the word you have been privileged to sit," — here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him, — "I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that you should no longer liide the name of him who tempted you to this griev- ous fall. But he opposes to me (with a young man's over-soft- ness, albeit wise beyond his years), that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in tlie com- mission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What say you to it, once again. Brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I, that shall deal with this poor sinner's soul?"
There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occu- pants of the balcony ; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tem- pered M-ith respect towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed.
|
THE RECOGNITION. |
75 |
||
|
"Good Master Dimmesdale/ |
' said he, |
"the responsibility of |
|
|
this woman^s soul lies greatly w |
ith you. |
It behooves |
you, there- |
|
fore, to exhort her to repentance, and to confession, |
as a proof |
||
|
and consequence thereof." |
|||
|
The directness of this appeal |
drew the |
eyes of the |
whole crowd |
upon the Eeverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest-land. His elo- quence and religious fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person of very strik- ing aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint. Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there Avas an air about this young minister, — an apprehensive, a startled, a half -frightened look, — as of a being who felt himself quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy by- paths, and thus kept himself simple and childlike ; coming forth, when occasion Avas, with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.
Such was the young man whom the Eeverend 'Mr. Wilson and the Governor had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman^s soul, so sacred even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.
76 THE SCARLET LETTER.
" Speak to the woman, my brother/^ said Mr. Wilson. " It is of moment to her soul, and therefore, as the worshipful Gov- ernor says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth ! "
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came forward.
" Hester Prynne,^' said he, leaning over the balcony and look- ing down steadfastly into her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man says, and seest the accountability under which I labor. If thou feelest it to be for thy souFs peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow- sufferer ! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him — yea, compel him, as it were — to add hypocrisy to sin ? Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him — who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself — the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips ! •'■'
The young pastor^s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sym- pathy. Even the poor baby, at Hester's bosom, was affected by the same influence ; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms, with a
THE RECOGNITION. 77
half-pleased, half-jDlaiutive murmur. So powerful seemed the minister's appeal, that the people could not believe but that Hester Prynne would speak out the guilty name; or else that the guilty one himself, in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend to the scaffold.
Hester shook her head.
"Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy ! " cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. " That little babe hath been gifted with a voice, to sec- ond and confirm the counsel which thou hast heard. Speak out the name ! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast."
" Never ! " replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wil- son, but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergy- man. "It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine ! "
" Speak, woman ! " said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold. "Speak; and give your child a father ! "
" I will not speak ! " answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. "And my child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one ! "
" She will not speak ! " murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. " Wondrous strength and generosity of a wo- man's heart ! She will not speak ! "
Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind.
78
THE SCARLET LETTER.
the elder clergyman^ who had carefully prepared himseK for the occasion, addressed to the multitude a discourse on siu, in all its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the people's
heads, that it
assumed new terrors in their imagi- nation, and seemed to de- rive its scar- let hue from the flames of the infernal pit. Hes- ter Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifl'erence. She had borne, that morning, all that nature could endure ; and as her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her
THE RECOGNITION,
79
ordeal^ pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush itj mechanically^ but seemed scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanor, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered, by those who peered after her, that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.
IV.
THE INTERVIEW.
!FTER her return to the prison, Hester Prynne Avas found to be in a state of nervous excite- ment that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving im- possible to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of pun- ishment. Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and like'W'ise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach, in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest. To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child ; who, drawing its suste- nance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the mother's system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.
THE INTERVIEW. 81
Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment appeared that individual^ of singular asjject^ whose presence in the crowd had been of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged in the prison^ not as suspected of any offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was announced as Eoger Chillingworth. The jailer, after ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to moan.
"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the practitioner. "Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your house ; and, I 'promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore."
"Nay, if your worshiji can accomplish that," answered Master Brackett, " I shall own you for a man of skill indeed ! Verily, the woman hath been like a j)ossessed one ; and there lacks little, that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her Avith stripes."
The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his demeanor change, when the withdrawal of the prison-keeper left him face to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close a re- lation between himself and her. His first care was given to the child ; whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took
82 THE SCARLET LETTER.
from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical prepa- rations^ one of which he mingled with a cup of water.
"My old studies in alchemy/^ observed he, "and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman ! The child is yours, — she is none of mine, — neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as a father^s. Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand."
Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing w^th strongly marked apprehension into his face.
"Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the mnoceut babe?" whis- pered she.
" Eoolish woman ! " responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly. "What should ail me, to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe ? The medicine is potent for good ; and were it my child, — yea, mine OAvn, as well as thine ! — I could do no better for it."
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech's pledge. The moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased ; and, in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny lie felt her pulse, looked into her eyes, — a gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold, — and, finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.
THE INTERVIEW. 83
"I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe/' remarked he; "but I have learned many new secrets in the wiklerness, and here is one of them, — a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus. Drink it ! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.''
He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and questioning, as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her slumbering child.
" I have thought of death," said she, — '^ have wished for it, — would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything. Yet if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it. See I It is even now at my lips."
" Drink, then," replied he, still with the same cold composure. ^'Dost thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my pur- poses wont to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than to let thee live, — than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life, — so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?" As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester's breast, as if it had been red-hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and smiled. *^Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes of men and women, — in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy husband, — in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take off this draught."
Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained
84 THE SCARLET LETTER.
the cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed where the child was sleeping ; while he drew the only chair which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt that — having now done all that humanity or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty, impelled him to do, for the relief of physical suffering — he was next to treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured.
" Hester," said he, " I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I, — a man of thought, — the bookworm of great libraries, — a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge, — what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girFs fantasy ! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path ! "
"Thou knowest," said Hester, — for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame, — "thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any."
THE INTERVIEW. 85
" True/^ replied he. " It was ray folly ! I have said it. But, up to that epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless ! My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one ! It seemed not so wild a dream, — old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was, — that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there ! "
^^I have greatly wronged thee,^^ murmured Hester.
"We have wronged each other," answered he. "Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophized in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?"
" Ask me not ! " replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. " That thou shalt never know ! "
"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self-relying intelligence. " Never know him ! Believe me, Hes- ter, there are few things, — whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought, — few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unre- servedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou raayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude. Thon mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for nfe, I come to
86
THE SCARLET LETTER.
the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as 1 have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me con- scious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs
be mine ! "
The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that Hester Prynne clasped her hands over her heart, dreading lest he should read the secret there at once.
" Thou wilt not reveal his name ? Not the less he is mine," resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. " He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his gar- ment, as thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven's own method of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I shall con- ' trive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine ! "
"Thy acts are like mercy,'' said Hester, bewildered and appalled. "But thy words interpret thee as a terror!"
"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee," continued the scholar. "Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine ! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou didst ever caU me husband ! Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments. No
IttTe soiigtit uke me cod. 1 H lyself
't mi mh
I 1
I .t
*lj ojion k, ttit, dieadinff
> be is mine," II were at one It into bis gar- art. let fear litb Heaven's rat iiim to tie kll con- , if, as I pi Letiira the less lie
iMi]
ippaM.
|
. secret ot til} |
|
If in this lanil |
|
;;,[ thOIl B^ |
|
I of the earth, |
|
^ and i*i |
|
niao, a A |
|
:..-pnt8, ^'o |
1. i r
I 1 i T '
|
'1 seek 1 |
||||
|
U see hi |
needs 1 |
|||
|
not |
. the sepret . reveal his uame look of confidence, as |
if desutiy A A |
were |
at one |
ars no letter of infamy wroiiglit into his gar-
h.i T .;,.n V ,.1
ler do ti
1,.. 1.
mm
>iutii p
|
■palled. |
||
|
.i.\iSi my V .10, i ■ftvj.i |
upon |
|
|
" ITiou hast kept t |
of thy |
|
|
viine! There are ni |
IS" land |
|
|
any human soul. |
thM th. |
Ml didst |
|
Here, on this wild o |
||
|
. elsewhere |
||
|
'lere a '• |
||
|
t^xi^r t\ |
THE INTERVIEW. 89
matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or wrong ! Thou and thine, Hester Prymie, belong to me. My home is where thou art, and where he is. But betray me not ! "
"Wherefore dost thou desire it?^' inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly knew why, from this secret bond. " Why not an- nounce thyself openly, and cast me off at once?"
"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the dishonor that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other reasons. Enough, it is my purjDose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come. Eecognize me not, by word, by sign, by look ! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware ! His fame, his position, his life, will be in my hands. Beware ! "
"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester.
"Swear it!" rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
"And now. Mistress Prynne," said old Eoger Chillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone; alone with thy infant, and the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?"
"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul ? "
^'Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine ! "
Y.
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE.
?^&5^^14^^STER PRYNNE'S term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she Avas made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength that would have suificed for many quiet years. The very law that condemned her — a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm —
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE. 91
had held her up, through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom; and she must either sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial with it ; so would the next day, and so would the next ; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down ; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, — at her, the child of honorable parents, — at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, — at her, who had once been innocent, — • as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.
It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her, — kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure, — free to return to her birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being, — and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with
92 THE SCARLET LETTER.
a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her^ — it may seem marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only^ she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feel- ing so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, Avere the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne^s wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth — even that village of rural England, Avhere happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother^s keeping, like garments put off long ago — were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too, — doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole, — it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that, unrecog- nized on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE. 93
seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe — what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New Eng- land— was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment ; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost ; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It
had been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while its compara- tive remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as alone
94 THE SCARLET LETTER.
grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A m3^stic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot. Children, too young to compre- hend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing in the doorway, or laboring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led townward; and, discerning the scarlet letter on lier breast, would scamper off with a strange, conta- gious fear.
Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art — then, as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp — of needle- work. She bore on her breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding what- ever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE. 95
extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with. Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the instal- lation of magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep rufFs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laM^s forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too, — whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors, — there was a fre- quent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen — for babies then wore robes of state — aff'orded still another possibility of toil and emolument.
By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curi- osity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant ; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Yanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her
96 THE SCARLET LETTER.
needlework was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby^s little cap ; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever- relentless rigor with which society frowned upon her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament, — the scarlet letter, — which it was her doom to wear. The child^s attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have applied to the better eiforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment, in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous. Oriental characteristic, — a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exer-
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE. 97
cise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an imma- terial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and stead- fast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath.
In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world. With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman's heart than that which branded the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from moral interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in mani- festing its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horri- ble repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her posi- tion, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tcnderest spot.
98 THE SCARLET LETTER.
The poor, as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often revik^d the hand that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufFerer^s defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient, — a martyr, indeed, — but she forbore to pray for her enemies ; lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly con- trived for her by the undying, tlie ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for tliey had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one only child. Therefore, first allow- ing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to
^ out to lie
if»i«, Tliose •K acrastomed time throngli on concoct a ■e, ik, tv f*! defenceless L Hester y ttnied to tiese tpressibly over >o[ bet km Mkorc to pray upratioDs, tlie :ves into
J slie feel tk minglv con- iitence of tlie set to address li its mingled If k entered Universal be text of tlie . for tliev liad filiin? liomUf he town, ffi'li
;j jhnll criR) M imrport to
I i i
I OQ
THE
'.t:ttt!"r
The poor, as wo have ■ ■ .sougUt out to be
the ol • " ' ' " >L tluit. was stretched
f' )'!. ' v. 'iliwise^ whose
..ccustomed
) her heart; sometimes through
tiiet maiice, by which women can concoct a
I uui ordinary trifles ; and ^ , also, by
' ,^uession, that fell upon the si-,. • 'Vnceless
! like a rough blow uptm an ulcerated woun cr had
hooled herself long and well; she never responded to these
! racks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over
her pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom.
She was patient, — a martyr, indeed, — but she forbore to pray
for iior enemies; lest, iij ^]M\^ of hn- forgiving aspirations, the
the blessing twist themselves into
Coniiimally, and in a t!
'•robs of anguiyii 'iiat iiau Uetu bo '.. -hr nr.lving, the ever-active > icn paused in the s'l
■ •' feel the
i; mi ugly con-
.'•»..■ of the
iddress
brought a crowd, with its mingled the poor, sinful woman. If she entered o share the Sabbath smile of the Universal '11 her mishap to find herself the text of the (... 'V to have a dread of children ; for they had
iml)ib ■ parents . a vague idea of something horrible
in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never in but one only child. Therefore, first allow-
ing her ■ . ^,:-, ;!]cy pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and tlip 1111,-1 .firr nf :i vnr.l i^v^i had no distmct purport to
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE. 101
their own minds^ but was none tlie less terrible to her, as pro- ceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame^ that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves, — had the summer breeze murmured about it, — had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud ! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter, — and none ever failed to do so, — they branded it afresh into Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. Trom first to last, m short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous ; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an eye — a human eye — upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned alone?
Her imagination w^as somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer moral and intellectual fibre, would have been stiU more so, by the strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walk- ing to and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester, — if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted, — she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter
102 THE SCARLET LETTER.
had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to beheve, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror- stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's ? Or, must she receive those intimations — so obscure, yet so distinct — as truth ? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportune- ness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Some- times the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. "What evil thing is at hand?^' would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint ! Again, a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumor of all tongues, had kept cold suoav within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron^s bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's, — what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would give her warning, — " Behold, Hester, here is a companion ! " — and, look- ing up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted with
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE. 103
a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks; as if her purity were some- what sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor simier to revere ? — such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always con- tributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up uito a terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but Avas red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne Avalked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modem incredulity may be inclined to admit.
VI.
PEARL,
WE have as yet hardly spoken of the infant ; that little crea- ture, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable de- cree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the intelli- gence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child ! Her Pearl ! — Por so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the cahn, white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she named the infant " Pearly'' as being
PEARL. 105
of great price^ — purchased with all she had^ — her mother^s only treasure ! How strange, mdeed ! Man had marked this woman^s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent forever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven ! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day, she looked fearfully into the child^s expanding nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being.
Certainly, there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden ; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the world's first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and deco- ration of the dresses which the child Avore, before the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining through
106 THE SCAELET LETTER.
the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler love- liness,, tliat there was an absolute circle of radiance around her, on the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. PearPs aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children^ compre- hending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost ; and if, in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to be her- self, — it would have been no longer Pearl !
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of lier inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but — or else Hester's fears deceived her — it lacked reference and adaptation, to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and briUiant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difiicult or impossible to be discovered. Hester could only account for the child's character — and even then most vaguely and imperfectly — by recalling what she her- self had been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold,
PEARL. 107
the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the imtempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the Avarfare of Hester^s spirit, at that epoch, M^as perpetuated in Pearl. She could recog- nize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child's disposi- tion, but later in the day of earthly existence might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.
The discipline of the family, in those days, was of a far more rigid kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in tlie way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the lonely mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any calcu- lable inlluence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside, and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Phys- ical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be labor thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look so
108 THE SCAELET LETTER.
intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such moments, Avhether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility ; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light, that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child, — to pursue the little elf in the flight which she inva- riably began, — to snatch her to her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses, — not so much from overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But PearVs laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before. Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps, — for there was no foreseeing how it might aff'ect her, — Pearl w^ould frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a stern, unsympathizing look of discontent. Not seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unin- telligent of human sorrow. Or — but this more rarely hap- pened— she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness;
PEARL. 109
it passed, as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incompre- hensible intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until — perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from beneath her open- ing lids — little Pearl awoke !
How soon — with what strange rapidity, indeed ! — did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words ! And then what a happiness would it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children ! But this could never be. Pearl was a bom outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Noth- ing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness ; the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole pecu- liarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children. Never, since her release from prison, had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her Avalks about the town. Pearl, too, was there; first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the settle- ment, on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic
110 THE SCARLET LETTER.
thresholds^ disporting themselves in such grim fashion as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance ; or at scourging Quakers ; or taking scalps in a sham-fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did. Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to iling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witches anathemas in some unknown tongue.
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intol- erant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child ; and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort, for her mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the chikFs manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inher- ited, by inalienable right, out of Hester^s heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening influences of maternity.
PEAKL. Ill
At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials — a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower — were the puppets of PearFs witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmerci- fully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity, — soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life, — and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so mucli as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, how-^ ever, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be little more than was observable in other children of bright facul- ties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng Avhich she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these off'spring of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad — then what
112 THE SCARLET LETTER,
depth of sorrow to a mother^ who felt in her own heart the cause ! — to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the contest that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan, — "0 Pather in Heaven, — if Thou art still my Father, — what is this being which I have brought into the world ! " And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware, through some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.
One peculiarity of the child^s deportment remains yet to be told. The very first thing which she had noticed in her life was — what ? — not the mother's smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the little mouth, remem- bered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no means ! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was — shall we say it ? — the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom ! One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter ; and, putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne 'clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavoring to tear it away; so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intel- ligent touch of Pearl's baby -hand. Again, as if her mother's ago- nized gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little
■ ■■' -■•■■3riuii '■■ ■-'p:i tiiat * BiW ensue. ' ^ »ork npoB ^ tould fain 1 Wiiit speed tt «t still mv
jrinie, IBli,roi
m yet to k is ter life was to it, as otkr
to-smU Te One day, as i eyes U tieen ■ ■ t;
smili
for bth,
! I 1
r ^ ^
111
TTIT
TTER.
V. UU H'll.. li! IHT
:) ll'--;iM. luc
I'lin/, t'io
of an a(] were to
:()(i.^f.iit, recognition uergies that t that must ensi;
•k ujjon Id fain
r cause, m ' :, Hester Pn I cried out
')ut which nu»..
— " 0 Father in Heaven •r, — what is this being which I liave brought into the world ! " And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware, through '.'tile channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn irt Mvnl ukI beautiful little face upon her mother, smQe with jprite-like intelligence, and resume her play. One pernliarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be TV first thing which she h life was
— what? — not the ) smile, r
' '- V ' ■ :' * ^ ■■ '■ - . ;v„h'ii)-
..scussion
iut that first
ne aware was — shall we
letter on Hester's bosom 1 One day, as
i; . <i over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been
(•a;mi:, — '-"• r^f the gold embroidery about the letter;
i.ud, pi.i hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not
doubtfnll- a decided gleam, that gave her face the
look r child. Then, gasping for breath, did
Hester Pry in : the fatal token, instinctively endeavoring
to tear it aw. ' ■ was the torture " '' '■ ' ' '"^6 intel-
l'f.-'^nt touch 01 . .y-hand. Again, aa _ r's ago-
, J gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little
PEARL. 115
Pearl look into her eyes, and smile ! Prom that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment's safety; not a moment's calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which PearFs gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile, and odd expression of the eyes. Once, this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing ; and, suddenly, — for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions, — she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face, in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer^s day, after Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom; dancing up and down, like a little elf, when- ever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had been to cover her bosom vnth. her clasped hands. But, Avhether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts
116 THE SCARLET LETTER.
for which she could find no bahn in this worlds nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping out — or, Avhether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it — from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
" Child, what art thou ? " cried the mother.
" O, I am your little Pearl ! " answered the child.
But, while she said it. Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down, with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney.
'^ Art thou my child, in very truth ? " asked Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was PearPs wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself.
" Yes ; I am little Pearl ! " repeated the child, continuing her antics.
" Thou art not my child ! Thou art no Pearl of mine ! " said the mother, half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came over her, in the midst of her deepest suffering. " Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither."
" Tell me, mother ! " said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees. "Do thou tell me ! "
" Thy Heavenly Father sent thee ! " answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acute- ness of the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freak-
PEARL. 117
ishness^ or because an evil spirit prompted iier, she put up her small forefinger^ and touched the scarlet letter.
" He did not send me ! " cried she^ positively. " I have no Heavenly Father!''
" Hush, Pearl, hush ! Thou must not talk so ! " answered the mother, suppressing a groan. " He sent us all into this world. He sent even me, thy mother. Then, much more, thee ! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come ? "
" Tell me ! Tell me ! " repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing, and capering about the floor. " It is thou that must tell me ! "
But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dis- mal labyrinth of doubt. She remembered — betwixt a smile and a shudder — the talk of the neighboring towns-people ; who, seek- ing vainly elsewhere for the child's paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring; such as, ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their mother's sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New England Puritans.
VII.
THE GOVERNOR'S HALL.
HESTER PRYNNE went, one day, to the mansion of Governor Bellingliam, with a pair of gloves, which she liad fringed and embroidered to his or- cUn-, and Avhich were to be Avorn on some great occasion of state ; for, though the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the highest rank, hi' still held an honorable and intlnential place among the colonial magistracy.
Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of embroidered gloves impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview Avith a personage of so much power and activity
THE GOVEllNOR'S HALL. 119
in the affairs of the settlement. It had reached her earsj that there was a design on the part of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the ele- ments of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these advantages, by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's. Among those who promoted the design. Governor Bcllingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which, in later days, would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of the town, should then have been a ques- tion publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of emhience took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight, than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not oidy caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important modification of the frame- work itself of the legislature.
Full of concern, therefore, — but so conscious of her own right that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public, on the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies
120 THE SCARLET LETTER.
of nature, on the other, — Hester Prynne set forth from her soli- tary cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother^s side, and, constantly in motion, from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms ; but was soon as imperious to be set down again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of PearFs rich and luxuriant beauty ; a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints; a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout her; she seemed the unpremedi- tated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child^s garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play ; arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread. So much strength of coloring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to PearFs beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.
But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevi- tably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form ; the scarlet letter endowed with life ! The mother herself — as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its form — had
THE GOVERNOR'S HALL. 121
carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity^ to create an analogy between the object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But^ in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in con- sequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from their play, — or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins, — and spake gravely one to another : —
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side ! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them ! "
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamp- ing her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threat- ening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence, — the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment, — whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to