Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (752 page)

To Tanglewood, as we called it, at all seasons of the year, came Hawthorne and his wife and children. In spring there was the issuing forth of the new life from beneath the winter coverlid; the first discovery of sociable houstonias, and the exquisite tints and fragrance of the mayflower on its dark, bearded stalk. When June became perfect, and afterwards till nuts were ripe, my father loved to lie at full length upon the mossy and leaf-strewn floor, looking up at the green roof, the lofty whispering-gallery of vaulted boughs, with its azure lattices and descending sunlight-shafts; wrapped in imaginings some of which were afterwards to delight the world; but many more of them, no doubt, were fated to join the glorious company of untold tales. Beside him sat our mother, on a throne which we had fashioned for her from the upright stump of a tree; round about them played the little girl and boy. They brought all the treasures which this wonderfully affluent world afforded: flowers in all seasons; strawberries, small but of potent flavor, which the little boy would gather with earnest diligence, and fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also fond of playing the role of magician. “Hide your eyes!” he would say, and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was a big cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled with these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone.

The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by scores; but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped against my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of them stung Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence. Her lip at once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the conclusion, by some tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence was at least half to blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully avoided it. I likewise avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of giving a hitch to their after-parts as they walk along always struck me as being obviously diabolical.

When the snows came, two and three feet deep, we got out the family sled from its summer lodging in the barn and went forth, muffled in interminable knit tippets and other woollen armor, to coast down the long slope. Our father sat in front with the reins in his hands and his feet thrust out to steer, and away we went clinging fast behind him. Sometimes we swept triumphantly to the bottom; at other times we would collide with some hidden obstacle, and describe each a separate trajectory into the snow-banks. We made enormous snow-balls by beginning with a small one and rolling it over and over in the soft snow till it waxed too vast for our strength; two or three of these piled one on another would be sculptured by the author of The Scarlet Letter into a snow-man, who would stand stanch for weeks. Snow-storms in Lenox began early and lasted till far into April. The little red house had all it could do, sometimes, to lift its upper windows above them. In the front yard there was a symmetrical balsam fir-tree, tapering like a Chinese pagoda. One winter morning we found upon one of its lower boughs a little brown sparrow frozen stiff. We put it in a card-board coffin, and dug out a grave for it beneath the fir, with a shingle head-stone. The funeral ceremonies had for the two mourners a solemnity such as is not always felt at such functions in later life.

Of the regular daily routine was the journey to Luther Butler's, quarter of a mile up the road, for milk and butter. I generally accompanied my father, and saw placid Luther's cows, placid as himself, with their broad, wet noses, amiable dark eyes, questionable horns, and ambrosial breath. Mr. Tappan, our landlord, had horses, and once he mounted me on the bare back of one of the largest of these quadrupeds, which, to the stupefaction of everybody, instantly set off at full gallop. Down the road we thundered, the rider, with his legs sticking out at right angles, screaming with joy, for this transcended any rocking-horse experiences. A hundred yards away there was a bend in the road. Just at that point there was a manure-pile, which had long bided its time. I had hold of a strand of the horse's mane; but when he swerved at the bend I had to let go, and after a short flight in air, the manure-pile received me in its soft embrace. Looking up the road, I saw Mr. Tappan, with dilated eyes and a countenance expressing keen emotion, coming towards me at a wonderful pace, and my father and mother following him at a short distance. I did not myself mind the smell of manure, and the others were glad to put up with it in consideration of my having escaped broken bones.

We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with, him, and Mr. G. P. R. James, a novelist of the Walter Scott school, had another, and I was permitted to bestride both of them; they were safe enough, but they would turn back their heads and lay their cold noses on my leg; I preferred the now-forbidden horse. But Melville himself made up for everything by the tremendous stories he used to tell about the South Sea Islands and the whale fishery. Normally he was not a man of noticeable appearance; but when the narrative inspiration was on him, he looked like all the things he was describing — savages, sea-captains, the lovely Fayaway in her canoe, or the terrible Moby Dick himself. There was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to loosen its grip by studying German metaphysics, but in vain. He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world; and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many secrets untold in his own career. But there were few honester or more lovable men than Herman Melville.

[IMAGE: HERMAN MELVILLE]

James (no relation of our distinguished contemporary) was a commonplace, meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation; but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact of his being associated with a furious thunder-storm. My father and I were alone in the house at the time; my mother had gone to West Newton on a three weeks' visit. In the midst of the thunder and lightning, the downpour and the hurricane, the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds, our door burst open, and behold! of all persons in the world to be heralded by such circumstances, G. P. R. James! Not he only, but close upon his heels his entire family, numerous, orthodox, admirable, and infinitely undesirable to two secluded gentlemen without a wife and mother to help them out. But it was a choice between murder and hospitality, and come in they must. Never before or after did our liliputian drawing-room harbor so large an assemblage. They dripped on the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the G. P. R. Jameses passed off together.

There were many other visitors, not only old friends, but persons attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book “along whose burning leaves,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, “his scarlet web our wild romancer weaves.” It was a novel experience for the man who had become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men; melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only, but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them all courteously; he was invariably courteous. “I would not have a drunken man politer than I,” he once answered me, when I asked him why he had returned the salutation of a toper. What counsel he gave to those who came to him as to a father confessor of course I know not; but later, when I used to sit in his office in the Liverpool consulate, I sometimes heard him speak plain truths to the waifs and strays who drifted in there; and truth more plain, yet bestowed with more humanity and brotherly purpose, I have never heard since. It made them tremble, but it did them good. Such things made him suffer, but he never flinched from the occasion by a hair's-breadth. He must have loved his fellow-creatures.

Somebody gave me a rabbit, which I named Hind-legs. I was deeply interested in him for a while, especially when I learned that he could not drink water; but he lasted only two weeks, and I am under the impression that I killed him. Not that I loved him less; but children are prone to experiment with this singular thing called life when it is in their power. They do not believe that death can be other than a transient phenomenon; the lifeless body may puzzle, but it does not convince them. I was certainly not a cruel urchin, and I can recall none but cordial sentiments towards Hindlegs on my part. I remember no details of the murder, if murder were done; but I do remember feeling no surprise when, one morning, Hindlegs was found dead. After so many years, I will not bring against the owner of Hindlegs a verdict of positive guilt; but I suspect him. Hindlegs, at all events, achieved an immortality which can belong to few of his brethren; for my father, after pooh-poohing the imbecile little bundle of fur for a day or two, conceived an involuntary affection for him, and reported his character and habits in his journal in a manner which is likely to keep his memory alive long after the hand that (perhaps) slew him is dust.

In default of dogs and Hindlegs, we had abundant cats. My father was always fond of these mysterious deities of ancient Egypt, and they were never turned away from our doors; but how so many of them happened to find us out in this remote region I cannot explain. It seems as if goodwill towards cats spontaneously generated them. They appeared, one after another, to the number of five; but when the time came for us to leave the red house forever, the cats would not and could not be packed up, and they were left behind. In my mind's eye I still see them, squatting abreast, silhouetted against the sky, on the brow of the hill as we drove down the road; for they had scampered after our carry-all when we drove away. Cats teach Americans what they are slow to learn — the sanctity and permanence of home.

But Lenox could not be a home for us. It was, indeed, a paradise for the children; but the children's father was never well there. He had a succession of colds — as those affections are called; it was ascribed to the variations of temperature during the summers; but the temperature would not have troubled him had he not been hard hit before he went to Berkshire. He got out of patience with the climate, and was wont to anathematize it with humorous extravagance, as his way was: “It is horrible. One knows not for ten minutes together whether he is too cool or too warm. I detest it! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul. Here, where I had hoped for perfect health, I have for the first time been made sensible that I cannot with impunity encounter nature in all her moods.” It was the summers that disagreed with him. “Upon the whole,” he said, “I think that the best time for living in the country is the winter.” It was during the winter that he did most of his writing. The House of the Seven Gables was written between September of 1850 and January or February of 1851.

But composition took more out of him than formerly. He admitted to his sister Louisa that he was “a little worn down with constant work,” and added that he could not afford any idle time now, being evidently of the opinion that his popularity would be short-lived, and that it behooved him, therefore, to make the most of it. But “the pen is so constantly in my fingers that I abominate the sight of it!” he exclaimed. This was after he had transgressed his custom of never writing in the hot months. He began in June and finished in forty days the whole volume of The Wonder-Book. He also read the tales to his domestic audience as fast as they were written, and benefited, perhaps, by the expert criticism of the small people. Many passages in the intercalated chapters, describing the adventures of Eustace Bright and the Tangle-wood children, are based on facts well known to his own two youngsters. And when Eustace tells his hearers that if the dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder were simply to put some sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them and Tangle-wood itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up the chimney — even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at the same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus early did he begin to grasp the philosophy of the truth of fiction.