I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of
presenting myself before my old associates, without first ascertaining
the state in which they were. A nameless foreboding weighed upon me.
Perhaps, should I know all the circumstances that had occurred, I might
find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen, and never
look at Blithedale more. Had it been evening, I would have stolen
softly to some lighted window of the old farmhouse, and peeped darkling
in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board. Then,
were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the door, glide
in, and take my place among them, without a word.
My entrance might be
so quiet, my aspect so familiar, that they would forget how long I had
been away, and suffer me to melt into the scene, as a wreath of vapor
melts into a larger cloud. I dreaded a boisterous greeting. Beholding
me at table, Zenobia, as a matter of course, would send me a cup of
tea, and Hollingsworth fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy,
and Priscilla, in her quiet way, would hand the cream, and others help
me to the bread and butter. Being one of them again, the knowledge of
what had happened would come to me without a shock. For still, at
every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face
that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.
Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the woods,
resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily as the
wild Indian before he makes his onset. I would go wandering about the
outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary
acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of the trees (a
kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant, like myself),
and entreat him to tell me how all things were.
The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up
beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who
chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough. I trod along by the
dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one of
its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the barkless
stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting itself to my
fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was, and if any
overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and
if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the
skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth,
clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old
despair.