The Blithedale Romance - Page 120/170

Thus excluded from everybody's confidence, and attaining no further, by

my most earnest study, than to an uncertain sense of something hidden

from me, it would appear reasonable that I should have flung off all

these alien perplexities. Obviously, my best course was to betake

myself to new scenes. Here I was only an intruder. Elsewhere there

might be circumstances in which I could establish a personal interest,

and people who would respond, with a portion of their sympathies, for

so much as I should bestow of mine.

Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.

Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I

determined to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining

whether the knot of affairs was as inextricable on that side as I found

it on all others. Being tolerably well acquainted with the old man's

haunts, I went, the next day, to the saloon of a certain establishment

about which he often lurked. It was a reputable place enough,

affording good entertainment in the way of meat, drink, and fumigation;

and there, in my young and idle days and nights, when I was neither

nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching the staid humors

and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.

At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently to

await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner, took

a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary

life that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with a good deal

of taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among them an

oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of juicy

tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and

incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron. Another work of high art

was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin; another, the

hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny fur; another, the

head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more exquisitely finished, a

brace of canvasback ducks, in which the mottled feathers were depicted

with the accuracy of a daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter, I

suppose, had wrought these subjects of still-life, heightening his

imagination with his appetite, and earning, it is to be hoped, the

privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he

liked best.

Then there was a fine old cheese, in which you could almost discern the

mites; and some sardines, on a small plate, very richly done, and

looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered. All

these things were so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have the

genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal charm;

it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and

thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to

appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial.

There were pictures, too, of gallant revellers, those of the old time,

Flemish, apparently, with doublets and slashed sleeves, drinking their

wine out of fantastic, long-stemmed glasses; quaffing joyously,

quaffing forever, with inaudible laughter and song; while the champagne

bubbled immortally against their moustaches, or the purple tide of

Burgundy ran inexhaustibly down their throats.