The Blithedale Romance - Page 12/170

Therefore, if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they

might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes, among the

fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all

went to rack with the crumbling embers and have never since arisen out

of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I

rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability

than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in

a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus

magnanimously persist in error.

Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation; but when he did

speak, it was very much to some practical purpose. For

instance:--"Which man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of

swine? Some of us must go to the next Brighton fair, and buy half a

dozen pigs."

Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude

for this? And again, in reference to some discussion about raising

early vegetables for the market:--"We shall never make any hand at

market gardening," said Silas Foster, "unless the women folks will

undertake to do all the weeding. We haven't team enough for that and

the regular farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth one

common field-hand. No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a

little too early in the morning, to compete with the market gardeners

round Boston."

It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised,

after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world,

should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the

outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth,

I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we

stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood. Nor

could this fail to be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and

better half of society should range itself on our side. Constituting so

pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest

of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual

bond among ourselves.

This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner consciousness

by the entrance of Zenobia. She came with the welcome intelligence

that supper was on the table. Looking at herself in the glass, and

perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid

(probably by being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she

flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw

away a faded violet. The action seemed proper to her character,

although, methought, it would still more have befitted the bounteous

nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand,

and to revive faded ones by her touch. Nevertheless, it was a singular

but irresistible effect; the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic

enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a

counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a

play-day of the years that were given us to live in. I tried to

analyze this impression, but not with much success.