The House of the Seven Gables

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  XI The Arched Window

  FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, ofhis ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spendone day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout thesummer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the precedingpages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefitoccasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that heshould look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, theyused to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. Itopened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, thebalustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed. Atthis arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself incomparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had anopportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movementas might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of anot very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worthseeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish,aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicatelyintelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimsonof the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with akind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every pettythrob of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of thebright young girl!

  If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street wouldhardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along itsextent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, andtitillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to theyoungest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strangeto him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping hereand there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying thatvast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhereand nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, butforgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settledalong their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs andomnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost itsproper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, duringthe sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the PyncheonHouse, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the whitedust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summershower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelledit into the commonest routine of their convenience. With thewater-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected himwith just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparentlysharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of thisperambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely asdid the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed whitedust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hearthe obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little wayfrom the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The ideaof terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as muchsurprise, the hundredth time as the first.

  Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension ofthe power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with theswiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspendedanimation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would belittle use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the timebeing, whenever this calamity befalls us.

  Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All theantique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as werecharacterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed hisfastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, theformer track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, asthe observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles inHerculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was anacceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from doorto door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove atrade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. Thebaker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effecton Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the verydissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set hiswheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the archedwindow. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or thecarving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked anedge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder mightapply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by thescissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hardstone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss asfierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomousserpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. ButClifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, howeverdisagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circleof curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared togive him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existencethan he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charmlay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed inhis childish ears.

  He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coachesnowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all thoseold square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, thatused to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife anddaughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries hadnot left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady countrylanes.

  But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble away, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. Thiswas observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modernfeature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stoppedunder the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quickprofessional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from thearched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter itsmelodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in aHighland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractionswherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company oflittle figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case ofhis organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italianmade it his business to grind out. In all their variety ofoccupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady withher fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by hercow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy aharmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italianturned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individualsstarted into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon ashoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved hisglittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jollytoper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book witheager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along thepage; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser countedgold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank. Yes;and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress onher lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired tosignify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever ourbusiness or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all danceto one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bringnothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affairwas, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified atonce, from the most extravagant life into
a dead torpor. Neither wasthe cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; norwas there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop moreof milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser'sstrong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All wereprecisely in the same condition as before they made themselves soridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and tobecome wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happierfor the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last tooacrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

  The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterousprolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian'sfeet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to everypasser-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, andto Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebeand Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off hisHighland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover,he made personal application to individuals, holding out his smallblack palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire forwhatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The meanand low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at everymiserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decentlyconcealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which itbetokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you coulddesire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing thegrossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibilityof satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a wholehandful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handedthem over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced aseries of pantomimic petitions for more.

  Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what countryhe might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a lookat the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moralcondition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being ofanother order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhileat the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; aweakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of thefiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented tothem.

  Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposingpretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along withthem. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact withthe world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever therush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This wasmade evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds offlaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequentuproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mereobject of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features thana procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectatorfeels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tediouscommonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and wearyself-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and thestiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back ofhis black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed fromsome vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through thecentre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; forthen, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of whichit is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--onecollected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animatingit. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing aloneover the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not inits atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive inits tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling tothe kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to theeffect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrainedfrom plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.

  So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw anappealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merelydisturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs,he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant morewould have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the wholeprocession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locksfloating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtueof the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Cliffordattained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges itsvictim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a naturalmagnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were noteasy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.

  But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a manhurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and heldhim back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was ahorror, burst into sobs and tears.

  "Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.

  "I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath. "Fearnothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survivedit, methinks it would have made me another man!"

  Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed ashock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into theocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by itsprofoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to theworld and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than thegreat final remedy--death!

  A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with hiskind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was madebeautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In theincident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, onClifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards thispoor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardonedfor regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be thesport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.

  It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, withits own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself overthe earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On sucha Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should beconscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church-bells, with varioustones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to oneanother,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--andover the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accentsafar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. Theair with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet formankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as theutterance of prayer.

  Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors asthey stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual onother days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that theirvery garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushedfor the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousersfinished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the qualityof ascension-robes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old housestepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwingupward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at thearched window. In
her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and aholiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much asever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty ofone's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet inher apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor hersmall straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowystockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all thefresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among therosebuds.

  The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up thestreet; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substancethat could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.

  "Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "doyou never go to church?"

  "No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"

  "Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could prayonce more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"

  She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft naturaleffusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at hiseyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for hishuman brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. Sheyearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they twotogether,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she nowrecognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among thepeople, and be reconciled to God and man at once.

  "Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere. Wehave not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go tosome place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor andforsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"

  So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as theycould in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung onpegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldysmell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their fadedbettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircasetogether,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-strickenClifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across thethreshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in thepresence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eyeon them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, andgave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made themshiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking onestep farther.

  "It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deepsadness. "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--noright anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, andwhich, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,"it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that Ishould be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would clingto their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"

  They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of thehouse tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for theglimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They couldnot flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stoodbehind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt hispitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one'sown heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

  But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we torepresent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On thecontrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, ofso much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and grieflessmoments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were noneof those questions and contingencies with the future to be settledwhich wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having bythe very process of providing for their support. In this respect hewas a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it longor short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a periodlittle in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscencesabout that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, thesufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerablybehind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe andHepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, thathe once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure orprint of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, inthe dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on awoman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different fromwhat Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an oldtrunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. HadClifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old andbroken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too muchto bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from themorning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even thenwould have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue ofmisfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, andenveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, andseldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, butslept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.

  Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies withchildren, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir intowhich rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Thoughprevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associatewith them, he loved few things better than to look out of the archedwindow and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, orschoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasantto him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together asflies do in a sunny room.

  Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. Oneafternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blowsoap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that hadbeen a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe inhis mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile overhis countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worstenemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it hadsurvived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from thewindow into the street! Little impalpable worlds were thosesoap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright asimagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to seehow the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they camefloating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection ofthe bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrilyupward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beautyafloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingersor their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perverselygratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth andsky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

  At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presencehappened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, andburst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind thearched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusinga dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.

  "Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon. "What! Still blowingsoap-bubbles!"

  The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had abitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy offear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which hispast experience might have given him, he felt that native and originalhorror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, andapprehensive character in the pre
sence of massive strength. Strengthis incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circleof his own connections.