Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good
fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to
me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make
difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal
narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine.
The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our
fellows. Those to whom good things come by way of inheritance, however,
are often among the latest to comprehend their own advantage; they
suppose it to be the common condition. And no doubt I had nearly arrived
at man's estate before it occurred to me that the lines of few fishers
of men were cast in places so pleasant as mine. I was the son of a
man of high desert, who had such friends as he deserved; and these
companions and admirers of his gave to me in the beginning of my days
a kindly welcome and encouragement generated from their affection and
reverence for him. Without doing a stroke of work for it, I found myself
early in the enjoyment of a principality of good will and fellowship--a
species of freemasonry, I might call it, though the secret was patent
enough--for the rights in which, unaided, I might have contended my
lifetime long in vain. Men and women whose names are consecrated apart
in the dearest thoughts of thousands were familiars and playmates of my
childhood; they supported my youth and bade my manhood godspeed. But
to me, for a long while, the favor of these gracious giants of mind and
character seemed agreeable indeed, but nothing out of the ordinary; my
tacit presumption was that other children as well as I could if they
would walk hand in hand with Emerson along the village street, seek in
the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown
clay of the "Greek Slave," or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman,
which could sway assembled thousands, modulate itself to tell stories to
the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her knees. Were human felicity so
omnipresent as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be!
In time, my misapprehension was corrected, rather, I think, through the
application to it of cold logic than by any rude awakening. I learned
of my riches not by losing them--the giants did not withdraw their
graciousness--but by comparing the lot of others with my own. And yet,
to tell the truth--perhaps I might better leave it untold; only in these
chapters, especially, I will not begin with reserves--to say truth,
then, my world, during my father's lifetime, and afterwards for I will
not say how long, was divided into two natural parts, my father being
one of them, and everybody else the other. Hence I was led to regard the
parties of the latter part, rich or poor, giants or pygmies, as being,
after all, of much the same stature and value. The brightness (in the
boy's estimation) of the paternal figure rendered distinctions between
other brightnesses unimportant. The upshot was, in short, that I
inclined to the opinion that while compassion was unquestionably due to
other children for not having a father like mine, yet in other respects
my condition was not egregiously superior to theirs. They might not know
the Brownings or the Julia Ward Howes; but then, very likely, the Smiths
and the Joneses, whom they did know, were nearly as good.
After fifty years, of course, such prepossessions yield to experience.
My father was the best friend I ever had, and he will always stand in
my estimation distinct from all other friends and persons; but I can now
recognize that in addition to the immeasurable debt I owe him for being
to me what he was in his own person, he bestowed upon me a privilege
also immeasurable in the hospitality of these shining ones who were his
intimates. Did the gift cost him nothing? Nothing, in one sense. But,
again, what does it cost a man to walk upright and cleanly during
the years of his pilgrimage: to deal justly with all, and charitably:
diligently to cultivate and develop every natural endowment: always to
seek truth, tell it, and vindicate it: to discharge to the utmost of his
ability every duty that was intrusted to him: to rest content, in the
line of his calling, with no work inferior to his best: to say no word
and do no act which, were they known, might weaken the struggle against
temptation of any fellow-creature? These qualities were the price at
which Hawthorne bought his friends; and in receiving those friends from
him, his children could not but feel that the bequest represented his
unfaltering grasp upon whatever is pure, lofty, and generous in human
life.
Yes, whatever it may cost a man of genius to be all his life a good
man, and to use and develop his genius to the noblest ends only, that my
father's friends cost him, and in that amount am I his debtor; and the
longer I myself live, and the more I see of other men, the higher and
rarer do I esteem the obligation. Moreover, in speaking of his friends,
I was thinking of those who personally knew him; but the world is full
to-day of friends of his who never saw him, to whom his name is my best
and surest introduction. Once, only three years since, in the remote
heart of the Colorado mountains, I chanced to enter the hut of an aged
miner; he sat in a corner of the little family room; on the wall near
his hand was fixed a small bookshelf, filled with a dozen dog-eared
volumes. The man had for years been paralyzed; he could do little more
than to raise to that book-shelf his trembling hand, and take from it
one or other of the volumes. When this helpless veteran learned my name,
he uttered a strange cry, and his face worked with eager emotion; the
wife of his broad-shouldered son brought me to him in his corner; his
old eyes glowed as they perused me. I could not gather the meaning of
his broken, trembling speech; the young woman interpreted for me. Was I
related to the great Hawthorne? "Yes; I am his son." "His son!" Seldom
have I met a gaze harder to sustain than that which the paralytic bent
upon me. Would I might have worn, for the time being, the countenance of
an archangel, so to fill out the lineaments, drawn during so many lonely
years by his imagination and his reverence, of his ideal writer! "The
son of Hawthorne!" He said no more, save by the strengthless pressure of
his hands upon my own; the woman told me how all the books on the little
shelf were my father's books, and for fifteen years the old man had read
no others. Helpless tears of joy, of gratitude, of wonder ran down the
furrows of his cheeks into his white beard. And how could I at whom he
so gazed help being moved: on that desolate, unknown mountain-side, far
from the world, the name which I had inherited was loved and honored!
One does not get one's privileges for nothing. My father gave me power
to make my way, and cast sunshine on the path; but he made the path
arduous, too!
Be that as it may, I now ask who will to look in my mirror, and see
reflected there some of the figures and the scenes that have made my
life worth living. As I peer into the dark abysm of things gone by, many
places that seemed at first indistinct, grow clearer; but many more must
remain impenetrable. Upon the whole, however, I am surprised to find how
much is still discernible. Nearly a score of years ago I published,
in the shape of a formal biography of Hawthorne and his wife, the
consecutive facts of their lives, and numerous passages from their
journals and correspondence. My aim is different now; I wish to indite
an informal narrative from my own point of view, as child, youth, and
man. There will be gaps in it--involuntary ones; and others occasioned
by the obligation to retain those pictures only that seem likely to
arouse a catholic interest. Yet there will be a certain intimacy in the
story; and some matters which history would omit as trivial will be here
adduced, for the sake of such color and character as they may contain.
I shall not stalk on stilts, or mouth phrases, but converse comfortably
and trustfully as between friends. If a writing of this kind be not
flexible, unpretending, discursive, it has no right to be at all. Art is
not in question, save the minor art that lives from line to line. Gossip
about men, women, and things--it can amount to little more than that.
In the earlier chapters the dramatis personae and the incidents must
naturally group themselves about the figure of my father; for it was
thus that I saw them. To his boy he was the fountain of love, honor, and
energy; and to the boy he seemed the animating or organizing principle
of other persons and events. With his death, in my eighteenth year, the
world appeared disordered for a season; then, gradually, I learned to do
my own orientation. I was destined to an experience superficially
much more active and varied than his had been; and it was a world
superficially very different from his in which I moved and dealt
There must follow a corresponding modification in the character of the
narrative; yet that, after all is superficial, too. For the memory of
my father has always been with me, and has doubtless influenced me more
than I am myself aware. And certainly but for him this book would never
have been attempted.
I
Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's
decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The
Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My
grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to
calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall
Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The
haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The
upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The
flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the
quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa
and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt
Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book
of the age.
My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned
woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the aid
of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on the
walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach me all
the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed according
to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But
as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters
mathematical especially; so that I gave her inexhaustible patience many
a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle
of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta; though the battle itself,
and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John,
stood clearly pictured in my imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to
my memory nothing arbitrary would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself
constructing a narrative, whether it be true or fictitious, I am
wedded to dates, and cannot be divorced from them. It must be set
down precisely when the events took place, in what years the dramatis
personae were born, and how old they were when each juncture of their
fortunes came to pass. I can no more dispense with dates than I can talk
without consonants; they carry form, order, and credibility. Or they
are like the skeleton which gives recognizable shape to men and animals.
Nothing mortal can get on without them..
Whether this addiction be in the nature of a reaction from my childish
perversity, giving my erudite and beloved aunt Lizzie (as I called her)
her revenge so long after our lessons are over; or how else to explain
it, I know not; but it leads me to affirm here that the nadir of my
father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At that time
his age was five-and-forty, and I was three.
The causes of this financial depression were several. One morning he
awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income
of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served
to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing
stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed
an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm should
set in; but Nathaniel Hawthorne was devoid of that useful ability. Nor
had he been able to spend less than he earned; so, suddenly, there he
was on his beam-ends. Leisure to write, certainly, was now abundant
enough; but he never was a rapid composer, and even had he been so, the
market for the kind of things he wrote was, in the middle of the past
century, in New England, neither large nor eager. The emoluments were
meagre to match; twenty dollars for four pages of the Democratic Review
was about the figure; and to produce a short tale or sketch of that
length would take him a month at least. How were a husband and wife and
their two children to live for a month on the mere expectation of
twenty dollars from the Democratic Review--which was, into the bargain,
terribly slow pay? Such was the problem which confronted the dark-haired
and grave-visaged gentleman as he closed his desk in the Salem
custom-house for the last time, and put on his hat to walk home.
Thanks, however, to some divine foresight on my mother's part, aided by
a wonderful talent for practical economy, she had secretly contrived
to save, out of her weekly stipends, small sums which in the aggregate
bulked large enough to make an important difference in the situation. So
when her husband disclosed his bad news, she opened her private drawer
and disclosed her banknotes, with such a smile in her eyes as I can
easily picture to myself. Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that
the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a
letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and
affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in
his mind; now was the time of times to shape it forth. Yonder upon the
table by the window stood the old mahogany writing-desk so long unused;
here were his flowered dressing-gown and slippers down-at-heel. He ought
to be able to finish the story before the miraculous savings gave out;
and then all he would have to do would be to write others. And, after
all, to be rid of the surveyorship was a relief.
But matters were not to be run off quite so easily as this. The Scarlet
Letter, upon coming to close quarters with it, turned out to be not a
story of such moderate caliber as Hawthorne had hitherto been used to
write, but an affair likely to extend over two or three hundred pages,
which, instead of a month or so, might not be completed in a year; yet
it was too late to substitute something more manageable for it--in the
first place, because nothing else happened to be at his disposal, and
secondly, because The Scarlet Letter took such intimate hold upon
the vitals of his heart and mind that he was by no means able to free
himself from it until all had been fulfilled. Only men of creative
genius know in what glorious and harrowing thraldom their creations hold
them. Having once been fairly begun, The Scarlet Letter must inevitably
finish itself for good or ill, come what might to the writer of it.
[IMAGE: BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]
This is a story of people and events, not a study in literary criticism;
but the writing of The Scarlet Letter was an event of no trifling
importance in the story of its author's life. To read the book is an
experience which its readers cannot forget; what its writing must have
been to a man organized as my father was is hardly to be conveyed in
words. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--he must live through each
one of them, feel their passion, remorse, hatred, terror, love; and he
must enter into the soul of the mysterious nature of Pearl. Such things
cannot with impunity be done by any one; the mere physical strain, all
conditions being favorable, would be almost past bearing. But my father,
though uniformly his bodily health was all his life sound, was never
what I would call a robust man; he was exquisitely balanced. At the time
he began his book he was jaded from years of office drudgery, and he was
in some anxiety as to the issue of his predicament. The house in
which he dwelt, small and ill-placed in a narrow side-street, with no
possibility of shutting out the noise of traffic and of domestic alarms,
could not but make the work tell more heavily upon him. But in addition
to this there were fortuitous occasions of emotional stress, all of
which I shall not mention; but among them were the distasteful turmoil
aroused by his political mishap; and, far more poignant, the critical
illness of his mother. Circumstances led to her being housed under his
roof; there she lingered long at death's door, and there at last she
died. He profoundly loved her; but deep-rooted, too, in both of them was
that strange, New England shyness, masking in visible ice the underlying
emotion. Not since his boyhood had their mutual affection found free,
natural expression; and now, in this final hour, that bondage of habit
caused the words of tenderness to stumble on their lips. The awful
majesty of approaching death, prompting them to "catch up the whole
of love and utter it" ere it be too late, wrought this involuntary
self-repression into silent agony.
She died; his own health was shaken to its foundations; his children
fell ill, his wife underwent acute suffering; and through all this, and
more, The Scarlet Letter must be written. No wonder that, when he came
to read the story in manuscript to his wife, his voice faltered and
broke; and she slipped to her knees and hid her face on her arms in the
chair. "I had been suffering," he commentated, long afterwards, "from
a great diversity and severity of emotion." Great works of art--things
with the veritable spirit of enduring life in them--are destined to be
born in sore travail and pain. Those who give them birth yield up their
own life to them.
It was at this period--say, about 1850--that my own personal
recollections, in a shadowy and incoherent way, begin. The shadows are
exclusively of time's making; they were not of the heart. All through
the trials of my parents I retained a jocund equanimity (save for some
trifling childish ailments) and esteemed this world a friendly and
agreeable place. The Scarlet Letter dashed my spirits not a whit; I
knew not of its existence, by personal evidence, till full a dozen years
later; and even the death of my grandmother left me light of heart, for
the passing of the spirit from the body can but awaken the transient
curiosity of a child of four. For the rest, my physical environment, in
itself amusing and interesting enough to me, had its chief importance
from the material it afforded on which to construct the imaginary
scenes and characters of my play. My sister Una and myself were forever
enacting something or somebody not ourselves: childish egoism oddly
decking itself in the non-ego. We believed in fairies, in magic, in
angels, in transformations; Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm, The Black
Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober history-books, and
Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography. But I did occasionally take note
of concrete appearances, too; and some of them I remember.
The house--the third which we had inhabited since my father became
surveyor--was on Mall Street, and was three stories in height, with a
yard behind and at one end; this yard, which was of importance to my
sister and myself, had access to the street by a swinging gate. There
were three or four trees in it, and space for play. The house was but
one room deep, and lying as it did about north and south, the rooms were
open to both the morning and the afternoon sunshine. They opened one
into the other in a series; and when my father was safe up-stairs in
his study, my mother would open all the doors of the suite on the lower
floor, and allow the children to career triumphantly to and fro. No
noise that we could make ever troubled her nerves, unless it was the
noise of conflict; the shriek of joy, however shrill, passed by her
harmless; but the lowest mutter of wrath or discontent distressed her;
for of such are the mothers of the kingdom of heaven! And so zealous was
our regard for her just and gentle law that I really think we gave way
as little as most children to the latter.
Of course, whenever the weather permitted, we were out in the yard,
or even promenaded for short distances up and down the street. And
once--"How are you?" inquired a friend of the family, as he drove by
in his wagon. "Oh, we've got the scarlet fever!" we proudly replied,
stepping out gallantly along the sidewalk. For we were treated by a
homoeopathic doctor of the old school, who was a high-dilutionist, and
mortal ills could never get a firm grip on us. In winter we rejoiced in
the snow; and my father's story of the Snow Image got most of its local
color from our gambols in this fascinating substance, which he could
observe from the window of his study.
The study was on the third floor of the house, secluded from the turmoil
of earth, so far as anything could be in a city street. No one
was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are
ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates
fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a
being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe
to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write,
luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both were
equipped for business rather than for beauty; furniture and garments
were simple in those Salem days. A homely old paper covered the walls, a
brownish old carpet the floor. There was an old rocking-chair, its black
paint much worn and defaced; another chair was drawn up to the table,
which stood to the left of the eastern window; and on the table was a
mahogany desk, concerning which I must enter into some particulars.
It was then, and for years afterwards, an object of my most earnest
scrutiny. Such desks are not made nowadays.
When closed, it was an oblong mahogany box, two feet long by half that
width, and perhaps nine inches high. It had brass corners, and a brass
plate on the top, inscribed with the name, "N. Hawthorne." At one end
was a drawer, with a brass handle playing on a hinge and fitting into
a groove or socket when down; there was a corresponding handle at the
other end, but that was for symmetry only; the one drawer went clear
through the desk. I often mused over the ethics of this deception.
Being opened, the desk presented a sloping surface two feet square,
covered with black velvet, which had been cut here and there and pasted
down again, and was stiffened with many ink-spatterings. This writing
surface consisted of two lids, hinged at their junction in the centre;
lifting them, you discovered two receptacles to hold writing-paper and
other desk furniture. They were of about equal capacity; for although
the upper half of the desk was the more capacious, you must not forget
that two inches of it, at the bottom, was taken up by the long drawer
already mentioned.
But there was, also, a more interesting curtailment of this interior
space. Along the very top of the desk, as it lay open, was a narrow
channel, perhaps a couple of inches wide and deep, divided into three
sections; two square ones, at the opposite ends, held the ink-bottle and
the sand-bottle; the long central one was for quill pens. These, in
the aggregate, appeared to the superficial eye to account for all that
remained of the cubic contents of the structure; but the supreme mystery
and charm of the affair was that they did not!
No; there was an esoteric secret still in reserve; and for years it
remained a secret to me. The bottle-sockets and pen-tray did not reach
down to the level of the long drawer by nearly an inch. Measurement
would prove that; but you would have said that the interval must be
solid wood; for nothing but a smooth panel met the eye when you pulled
aside the sheets of writing-paper in their receptacle to investigate.
But the lesson of this world, and of the desk as a part of it, is that
appearances are not to be trusted. The guile of those old desk-makers
passes belief.
I will expose it. In the pen-tray lay a sort of brass nail, as long as
your little finger, and blunt at the end. Now take the sand-bottle from
its hole. In one corner of the bottom thereof you will see a minute
aperture, just big enough to admit the seemingly useless brass nail.
Stick it in and press hard. With an abrupt noise that makes you jump, if
you are four or five years old, that smooth, unsuspected strip of
panel starts violently forward (propelled by a released spring) and
reveals--what? Nothing less than the fronts of two minute drawers. They
fit in underneath the pen-tray, and might remain undiscovered for a
hundred years unless you had the superhuman wit to divine the purpose of
the brass nail. The drawers contain diamonds, probably, or some closely
folded document making you the heir to a vast estate. As a matter of
fact, I don't know what they contained; the surprise of the drawers
themselves was enough for me. I need not add that I did not guess the
riddle myself; but nothing that I can call to mind impressed me more
than when, one day, my father solved it for me with his little brass
wand. At intervals, afterwards, I was allowed to work the miracle
myself, always with the same thrill of mysterious delight. The desk was
human to me; it was alive.
There were little square covers for the ink and sand-bottles; and on
the under sides of these were painted a pair of faces; very ruddy in the
cheeks they were, with staring eyes and smiling mouths; and one of them
wore a pair of black side-whiskers. They were done by my father, with
oil--colors filched from my mother's paint-box. They seemed to me
portraits of the people who lived in the desk; evidently they enjoyed
their existence hugely. And when I considered that the desk was also
somehow instrumental in the production of stories--such as the Snow
Image--of a delectable and magical character, the importance to my mind
of the whole contrivance may be conceived. When I grew beyond child's
estate, I learned that it had also assisted at the composition of The
Scarlet Letter. If ever there were a haunted writing-desk, this should
have been it; but the ghosts have long since carried it away, whither I
know not.
On the table were two ornaments; one, the finely moulded figure of
an Egyptian in bronze, the wide Egyptian head-dress falling on the
shoulders, the arms lying rigidly at the sides, with fists clinched.
Generations of handling had made it almost black, but the amiable
expression of the little countenance--the figure was about seven inches
tall--greatly endeared it to me. Its feet were pressed close together
on a small round stand; but one day somebody set it down on a hot stove,
where it remained without flinching till the feet were melted off. After
some years my mother had an ebony stump affixed to it, preserving the
proportions of the figure and setting it once more erect. He was of
greater endurance and of finer physical if not of moral development than
the Tin Soldier of Hans Christian Andersen. The other ornament, less
than half the Egyptian's size, and also made of bronze, was a warrior in
mediaeval armor, whose head lifted off, showing a sharp-pointed rod
the sheath of which was the body. Its use was to pick the wicks of the
oil-lamps of that epoch, and its name was Mr. Pickwick. When afterwards
I became acquainted with the world's Mr. Pickwick, I supposed his
creator had adopted the name from our bronze warrior; but the world's
Pickwick was made of stuff more enduring than bronze; he remains, but
our little warrior has vanished.
I come now to the human occupant of this chamber of marvels. I see a
tall, strong man, whose wide-domed head was covered with wavy black
hair, bushing out at the sides. It thinned somewhat over the lofty crown
and brow; the forehead was hollowed at the temple and rounded out above,
after the Moorish style of architecture. Under heavy, dark eyebrows were
eyes deep-set and full of light, marvellous in range of expression,
with black eyelashes. All seemed well with me when I met their look. The
straight, rather salient nose had a perceptible cleft at the tip, which,
I was told, was a sign of good lineage; muddy-mettled rascals lacked it;
so that I was much distressed by the smooth, plebeian bluntness, at that
time, of my own little snub. The mouth, then unshaded by a mustache,
had a slight upward turn at the corners, indicative of vitality and
good-humor; the chin rounded out sharply convex from the lip. The round,
strong column of the neck well supported the head; my mother compared it
with that of the Apollo Belvedere, a bust of which stood in the corner
of our sitting-room. The head was deep--a great distance between the
base of the ear and the wing of the nostril--and was well filled out
behind. Above the blue of the shaven beard the complexion showed clear
white and red, announcing a strong heart and good digestion. My father
shaved himself daily; I was not permitted to see the operation, but
I knew he lathered, and wondered why. He was naturally athletic;
broad-shouldered and deep in the chest, lean about the loins, weighing
never over one hundred and eighty pounds; his height was five feet ten
and three-quarter inches; his legs and feet were slender and graceful,
his gait long and springy, and he could stand and leap as high as his
shoulder. In the house he wore slippers, which seemed always old and
down-at-heel.
In the house, also, he wore a writing-gown, made for him some years
before by my mother; it reached nearly to his heels, and had been a
gorgeous affair, though now much defaced. The groundwork was purple,
covered all over with conventional palm-leaf in old-gold color; the
lining was red. This lining, under the left-hand skirt of the gown, was
blackened with ink over a space as large as your hand; for the author
was in the habit of wiping his pen thereon; but my mother finally
parried this attack by sewing in the centre of the place a penwiper in
the shape of a butterfly.
While story-writing, the door of the study was locked against all the
world; but after noon he became approachable, except during The Scarlet
Letter period, when he wrote till evening. He did not mind my seeing him
write letters; he would sit with his right shoulder and head inclined
towards the desk; the quill squeaked softly over the smooth paper, with
frequent quick dips into the ink-bottle; a few words would be written
swiftly; then a pause, with suspended pen, while the next sentence was
forming in the writer's mind. When he miswrote, instead of crossing out
the word, he would smear it out with his finger, and rewrite over
the smear; so that his page had a mottled appearance. The writing was
accompanied by intermittent nods of the head, as one would say, "Sic
cogito!" So far as he is concerned, the shadows close in on me here.
But I have said that the house was of three stories, and I have
accounted for two of them only. The second was occupied by my
grandmother Hawthorne and her two daughters, Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe
(the latter appellation being an infantile version of her name invented
by my father, who was her junior, and used by us to distinguish between
her and that other Elizabeth who was Aunt Lizzie Peabody). Of my
grandmother Hawthorne I have no personal recollection at all; she was
a Manning, a beautiful old lady, whom her son resembled. She had been
a recluse from society for forty years; it was held to be good form, in
that age and place, to observe such Hindoo rites after the death of a
husband; hers had died in his thirty-fourth year in Surinam. But she
had also insensibly fallen into the habit of isolating herself in some
degree from her own family; they were all of them addicted to solitude
of the body, though kindly enough disposed in the abstract. When we
went to live in the Mall Street house, the old lady and her daughters
uprooted themselves from their home of many years in Herbert Street and
dwelt with us; and that quaint crystallization of their habits was in a
measure broken up. But the dowager Mrs. Hawthorne, it soon appeared, had
come there to die; she was more than seventy years old. My aunt Louisa I
seem dimly to recall as a tall, fragile, pale, amiable figure, not very
effective. My aunt Ebe I afterwards came to know well, and shall defer
mention of her. So I was encompassed by kindly petticoats, and was very
happy, but might have been better for a stout playmate of my own sex.
I had a hobby-horse, which I rode constantly to fairy-land in quest of
treasure to bestow upon my friends. I swung with Una on the gate, and
looked out upon the wonder of the passing world. The tragedy of my
grandmother's death, which, as I have said, interrupted the birth of
The Scarlet Letter, passed me by unknowing, or rather without leaving a
trace upon my memory. On the other hand, I can reconstitute vividly two
absurd incidents, destitute of historical value. After my grandmother
Hawthorne's death I fell ill; but the night before the disease declared
itself, I was standing in a chair at the nursery window, looking out at
the street-lamp on the corner, and my aunt Lizzie Peabody, who had just
come on from Boston, was standing behind me, lest I should fall off.
Now, I was normally the most sweet-tempered little urchin imaginable;
yet suddenly, without the faintest warning or provocation, I turned
round and dealt my loving aunt a fierce kick in the stomach. It deprived
her of breath for a space; but her saintly nature is illustrated by the
fact that the very first use she made of her recovered faculties was
to gasp out, "Sophie, the child must be ill!" Fortunately for my
reputation, the illness was not long in arriving. The other episode must
have happened at about the same period, and is likewise concerned with
Aunt Lizzie. We had a cat, and the cat had had kittens a day or two
before. Aunt Lizzie came into the nursery, where Una and I were building
houses of blocks, and sat down in the big easy-chair. The cat was in
the room, and she immediately came up to my aunt and began to mew and to
pluck at her dress with her claws. Such attentions were rare on pussy's
part, and my aunt noticed them with pleasure, and caressed the animal,
which still continued to devote its entire attention to her. But there
was something odd in the sound of her mewing and in the intent regard of
her yellow eyes. "Can anything be the matter with pussy?" speculated
my aunt. At that moment my father entered the room, and my aunt rose to
greet him. Then the massacre was revealed, for she had been sitting upon
the kittens. Their poor mother pounced upon them with a yowl, but it
was too late. My dear aunt was rather a heavy woman, and she had been
sitting there fifteen minutes. We all stood appalled in the presence of
the great mystery.
One day a big man, with a brown beard and shining brown eyes, who
bubbled over with enthusiasm and fun, made his appearance and talked
volubly about something, and went away again, and my father and mother
smiled at each other. The Scarlet Letter had been written, and James
T. Fields had read it, and declared it the greatest book of the age. So
that was the last of Salem.