The Scarlet Letter

HE 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 towns-people, 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 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 forever 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 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 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. “Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see
how cheery is everybody’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 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 commonwealth—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
applicances 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 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 different 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 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 behavior 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 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 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 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!”

[Illustration: Chillingworth,—“Smile with a sinister meaning”]

“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.

[Illustration]

XXII.