第53章 THE HOTEL(1)

Arriving in town (where my bachelor-rooms, long before this time, had received some other occupant), I established myself, for a day or two, in a certain, respectable hotel.It was situated somewhat aloof from my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid most of my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other interests, and who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of the amateur workingman.The hotel-keeper put me into a back room of the third story of his spacious establishment.The day was lowering, with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly tempered east wind, which seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated by sweeping over the roofs, and amalgamating itself with the dusky element of city smoke.All the effeminacy of past days had returned upon me at once.

Summer as it still was, I ordered a coal fire in the rusty grate, and was glad to find myself growing a little too warm with an artificial temperature.

My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.

There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into one impression.It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life.True, if you look at it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country.But, considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into the current history which time was writing off.At one moment, the very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy room in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a speculative man.I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed the actual world of its solidity.It nevertheless involved a charm, on which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.

Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind.I felt as if there could never be enough of it.Each characteristic sound was too suggestive to be passed over unnoticed.Beneath and around me, I heard the stir of the hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper; steps echoing on the staircase;the ringing of a bell, announcing arrivals or departures; the porter lumbering past my door with baggage, which he thumped down upon the floors of neighboring chambers; the lighter feet of chambermaids scudding along the passages;--it is ridiculous to think what an interest they had for me! From the street came the tumult of the pavements, pervading the whole house with a continual uproar, so broad and deep that only an unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it.A company of the city soldiery, with a full military band, marched in front of the hotel, invisible to me, but stirringly audible both by its foot-tramp and the clangor of its instruments.Once or twice all the city bells jangled together, announcing a fire, which brought out the engine-men and their machines, like an army with its artillery rushing to battle.Hour by hour the clocks in many steeples responded one to another.

In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion.Then ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and thump of sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels.All this was just as valuable, in its way, as the sighing of the breeze among the birch-trees that overshadowed Eliot's pulpit.

Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human activity and pastime.It suited me better, for the present, to linger on the brink, or hover in the air above it.So I spent the first day, and the greater part of the second, in the laziest manner possible, in a rocking-chair, inhaling the fragrance of a series of cigars, with my legs and slippered feet horizontally disposed, and in my hand a novel purchased of a railroad bibliopolist.The gradual waste of my cigar accomplished itself with an easy and gentle expenditure of breath.My book was of the dullest, yet had a sort of sluggish flow, like that of a stream in which your boat is as often aground as afloat.Had there been a more impetuous rush, a more absorbing passion of the narrative, Ishould the sooner have struggled out of its uneasy current, and have given myself up to the swell and subsidence of my thoughts.But, as it was, the torpid life of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment to the life within me and about me.At intervals, however, when its effect grew a little too soporific,--not for my patience, but for the possibility of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from the rocking-chair, and looked out of the window.

A gray sky; the weathercock of a steeple that rose beyond the opposite range of buildings, pointing from the eastward; a sprinkle of small, spiteful-looking raindrops on the window-pane.In that ebb-tide of my energies, had I thought of venturing abroad, these tokens would have checked the abortive purpose.