Nathaniel Hawthorne/Nathaniel Hawthorne.iso/pc/articles/a1/t0023

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                                                       XXI                                                   258
                                      The New England Holiday

BETIMES in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to
receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and little Pearl
came into the market-place. It was already thronged with the craftsmen and
other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in considerable numbers; among
whom, likewise, were many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins
marked them as belonging to some of the forest settlements, which
surrounded the little metropolis of the colony.
     On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years past,
Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue than
by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had the effect of making
her fade personally out of sight and outline; while, again, the scarlet letter
brought her back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under
the moral aspect of its own illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the
townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to
behold there. It was like a mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a
dead woman's features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that
Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had
departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
     It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen before,
nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some preternaturally
gifted observer should have first read the heart, and have afterwards sought
a corresponding development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual
seer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude
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through seven miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something
which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more,
encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long
been agony into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and
its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied
her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your
reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and
hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!"
Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human
nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the
moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had
been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an
irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the cup of
wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood had
been perpetually flavored? The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to
her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and
golden beaker; or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees
of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest
potency.
     Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossible to
guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape
of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must
have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had
achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a peculiarity
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to Hester's simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed
an effluence, or inevitable development and outward manifestation of her
character, no more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy
from a butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with
her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular
inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the
shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings
of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in
the agitations of those connected with them; always, especially, a sense of
any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind, in domestic
circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her mother's
unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions
which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester's brow.
     This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than
walk by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of a wild,
inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reached the market-
place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that
enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome
green before a village meeting-house, than the centre of a town's business.
     "Why, what is this, mother?" cried she. "Wherefore have all the people
left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See, there is the
blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his Sabbath-day
clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any kind body would
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only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding
and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother?"
     "He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.
     "He should not nod and smile at me, for all that,--the black, grim, ugly-
eyed old man!" said Pearl. "He may nod at thee if he will; for thou art clad
in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But, see, mother, how many faces of
strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors! What have they all
come to do here in the market-place?"
     "They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester. "For the Governor
and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great people
and good people, with the music, and the soldiers marching before them."
     "And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl. "And will he hold out both
his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the brook-side?"
     "He will be there, child," answered her mother. "But he will not greet
thee to-day; nor must thou greet him."
     "What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking partly to
herself. "In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and
mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep
forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks
with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my forehead, too, so
that the little brook would hardly wash it off! But here in the sunny day, and
among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange,
sad man is he, with his hand always over his heart!"
     "Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things," said her mother.
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"Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is
every body's face to-day. The children have come from their schools, and
the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be
happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so--as
has been the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered--they
make merry and rejoice; as if a good and golden year were at length to pass
over the poor old world!"
     It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened
the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year--as it already was,
and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries--the Puritans
compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human
infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space
of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other
communities at a period of general affliction.
     But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the
market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic
gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny
richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed
as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and
joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary
taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public
importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would
it have been impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to
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combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a
grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,
at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of this
kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the
colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendor, a
colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in proud
old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's
show,--might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with
reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders
of the common-wealth--the statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it
a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance
with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social
eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's eye,
and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government
so newly constructed.
     Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing
the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry,
which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece and material with their
religion. Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular
merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth's time,
or that of James;--no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel with his
harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music;
no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir
up the multitude with jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still
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effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful
sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would
have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by
the general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however, the
great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but widely too.
Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared
in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and
which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the
courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in
the differing fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and
there about the market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at
quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on the platform of the
pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defence were
commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to
the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the
interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty
of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places.
     It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then in
the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had
known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare favorably,
in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an
interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the
early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the
national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to
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clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
     The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was
the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened
by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their savage finery of
curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow
ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed
spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what
even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted
barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could
more justly be claimed by some mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel
from the Spanish Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of
Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened
faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined
about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even
in good nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They
transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were
binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing,
at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitæ from pocket-flasks, which
they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably
characterized the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a
license was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on
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shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor
of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There
could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew, though no
unfavorable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we
should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would
have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.
     But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed very much
at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any
attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might
relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and
piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life, was he
regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic, or
casually associate. Thus, the Puritan elders, in their black cloaks, starched
bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor
and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither
surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger
Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close
and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
     The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as apparel
went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion of
ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which was also encircled
by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather. There was a sword at his
side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his
hair, he seemed anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could
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hardly have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them
both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question before a
magistrate, and probably incurring fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an
exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster, however, all was
looked upon as pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
     After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach the spot
where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize, and did not
hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a
small, vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formed itself about her, into
which, though the people were elbowing one another at a little distance,
none ventured, or felt disposed to intrude. It was a forcible type of the
moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly
by her own reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so
unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it
answered a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak
together without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester
Prynne's repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for
rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result of
scandal than herself.
     "So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready one
more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship-fever, this
voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other doctor, our only
danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot of
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apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel."
     "What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger?"
     "Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician here--
Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare with you?
Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your party, and a
close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he that is in peril from these
sour old Puritan rulers!"
     "They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt
together."
     Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at
that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the
remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile which--
across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and laughter,
and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the crowd--conveyed secret
and fearful meaning.