The Blithedale Romance - Page 71/170

As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion

than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have

been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity,

tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his

intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed

to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia

should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied his mind that it was

all folly, and only another shape of a woman's manifold absurdity,

which men can never understand. How many a woman's evil fate has yoked

her with a man like this! Nature thrusts some of us into the world

miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with hardly any

sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals.

No passion, save

of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor the delicacy that results from

this. Externally they bear a close resemblance to other men, and have

perhaps all save the finest grace; but when a woman wrecks herself on

such a being, she ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her

has no corresponding part in him. Her deepest voice lacks a response;

the deeper her cry, the more dead his silence. The fault may be none

of his; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul. But the

wretchedness on her side, and the moral deterioration attendant on a

false and shallow life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet,

are among the most pitiable wrongs that mortals suffer.

Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and

woman,--outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering like two lovers in the

wood,--I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might

have fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her

passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake,

here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which

distinguished the more public portion of her life.

Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I began to think it the

design of fate to let me into all Zenobia's secrets, and that therefore

the couple would sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a conversation

which would leave me nothing to inquire. No doubt, however, had it so

happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a

listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by

sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one

of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest. But real life never arranges

itself exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit

down at all. Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree,

Zenobia's utterance was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so cool

and low, that I hardly could make out an intelligible sentence on

either side. What I seem to remember, I yet suspect, may have been

patched together by my fancy, in brooding over the matter afterwards.