Nathaniel Hawthorne/Nathaniel Hawthorne.iso/pc/articles/a1/t0008

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                                                          VI                                                    100
                                                        Pearl

WE have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose
innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree 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 intelligence that threw
its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child! Her Pearl! --For
so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had
nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by
the comparison. But she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price,--
purchased with all she had,--her mother's only treasure! How strange,
indeed! 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 for ever 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 for 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,
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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 decoration of the dresses which the child wore, before the
public eye. So magnficent was the small figure, when thus arrayed, and
such was the splendor of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining through the
gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that 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. Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell
of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children,
comprehending 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 herself;--it would have been no longer Pearl!
     This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express,
the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          102

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 brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar
to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was
difficult 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 herself 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, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the
untempered light, of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of
Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize
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 disposition, 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 the way of
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          103

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 calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to
stand aside, and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses.
Physical 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 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, whether Pearl was 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,
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          104

Hester was constrained to rush towards the child,--to pursue the little elf in
the flight which she invariably 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 Pearl's 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 affect her,--Pearl would
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 unintelligent of human
sorrow. Or--but this more rarely happened--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; 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 incomprehensible 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 opening lids--little Pearl awoke!
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          105

     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 born outcast of the infantile
world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among
christened infants. Nothing 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 peculiarity, 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 walks
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 settlement, on
the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic 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
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          106

terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill,
incoherent exclamations that made her mother tremble, because they had so
much the sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue.
     The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant 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 child's 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 inherited,
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.
     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 whenever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials,
a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower, were the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft,
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          107

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 unmercifully. 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 much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the
mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing
mind, there might be little more than was observable in other children of
bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was
thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity
lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offspring
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 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.
                                The Scarlet Letter -- VI. Pearl                          108

     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,--"O Father in
Heaven,--if Thou are 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, remembered 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 endeavouring to tear it away; so infinite was the
torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if
her mother's agonized gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did
little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile! From that epoch, except when the
child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment's safety; not a moment's
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calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during
which Pearl's 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, elfish 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, whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first
motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But, whether
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 for which she could find no balm in this world,
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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, whether it peeped or not, her mother so imagined it--
from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
     "Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.
     "0, 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 Pearl's 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 acuteness of the child. Whether
moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because an evil spirit prompted
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her, 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 dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She remembered--betwixt a smile and a shudder--the
talk of the neighbouring townspeople; who, seeking 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 mothers' 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.