Chapter 3

Meanwhile, they shall
be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the
unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition I contemplate
depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that
most drew my attention to the mysterious package was a certain affair
of fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There were traces about it of
gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced, so
that none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been
wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework;
and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such
mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered
even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth—for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to
little other than a rag—on careful examination, assumed the shape of a
letter.

It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb
proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had
been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of
dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in
by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent
are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope
of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
Certainly there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of
interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic
symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading
the analysis of my mind.

When thus perplexed—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the
letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men
used to contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians—I happened to
place it on my breast. It seemed to me—the reader may smile, but must
not doubt my word—it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation
not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if
the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and
involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto
neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had
been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find
recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation
of the whole affair. There were several foolscap sheets, containing
many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester
Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the
view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period between the
early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century.
Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their
youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn
aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go
about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever
miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give
advice in all matters, especially those of the heart, by which means—as
a person of such propensities inevitably must—she gained from many
people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked
upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this
singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story
entitled “THE SCARLET LETTER”; and it should be borne carefully in mind
that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original papers, together with
the scarlet letter itself—a most curious relic—are still in my
possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the
great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not
be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and
imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within
the limits of the old Surveyor’s half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On
the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or
altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own
invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There
seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the
ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing
his immortal wig—which was buried with him, but did not perish in the
grave—had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his
port was the dignity of one who had borne His Majesty’s commission, and
who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so
dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog look of a
republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself
less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own
ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to
me the scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript.
With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred
consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might
reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor—to bring his mouldy
and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. “Do this,” said the
ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so
imposing within its memorable wig; “do this, and the profit shall be
all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as
it was in mine, when a man’s office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an
heirloom. But I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give
to your predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightfully due”
And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue—“I will”.

On Hester Prynne’s story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was
the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro
across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long
extent from the front door of the Custom-House to the side entrance,
and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old
Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed
by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning
footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that
the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that
my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could
ever put himself into voluntary motion—was to get an appetite for
dinner. And, to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind
that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of
so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of
a Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that,
had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt
whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would ever have been brought
before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would
not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I
did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be
warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my
intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses,
and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous
defiance. “What have you to do with us?” that expression seemed to say.
“The little power you might have once possessed over the tribe of
unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public
gold. Go then, and earn your wages!” In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without
fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held
possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles
into the country, whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I bestirred
myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature which used to give me
such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped
across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon
me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it
quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted
only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture
forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the
brightening page in many-hued description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the
little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with
each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that they seem to lose
their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too
small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity
thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse—whatever, in a word, has been used or played
with during the day is now invested with a quality of strangeness and
remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight.
Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral
territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without affrighting us. It
would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we
to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now
sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect
that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had
never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in producing the
effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling,
and a reflected gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer
light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and
communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness
to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images
into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep
within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished
anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor, and a repetition of all
the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the
actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with
this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream
strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to
write romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them—of no great richness or value, but the best I
had—was gone from me.

It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous
colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively
upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist
on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every
moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude
contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been
to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of
today, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the
burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true
and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome
incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The
fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed
dull and commonplace only because I had not fathomed its deeper import.
A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At
some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments
and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page.

These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of
affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and
essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That
was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted
by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling,
without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at
every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the
fact there could be no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was
led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question. In some
other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it
here to say that a Custom-House officer of long continuance can hardly
be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one
of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the
very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of
such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position—is, that while he leans on the
mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him.
He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his
original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possesses an
unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not
operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The
ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth
betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and
become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually
keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust
out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath
of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity—that his
tempered steel and elasticity are lost—he for ever afterwards looks
wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His
pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all
discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while
he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera,
torments him for a brief space after death—is, that finally, and in no
long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be
restored to office. This faith, more than anything else, steals the
pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of
undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to
pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the
strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work
for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so
soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of
glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to
observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow
with this singular disease. Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to
the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment
like that of the devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to
himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving,
if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force,
its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that
gives the emphasis to manly character.

Here was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the Surveyor brought
the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly
undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its
poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I
could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the
truth, it was my greatest apprehension—as it would never be a measure
of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being
hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign—it was my chief
trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the
Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector.
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me,
finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend—to make the
dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an
old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A dreary
look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of
happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and
sensibilities. But, all this while, I was giving myself very
unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I
could possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship—to adopt the
tone of “P. P.”—was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.
It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages
of official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile
administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched
mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man
of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the
control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness
throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is
developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is
himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were
a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my
sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were
sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me—who have been a
calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The
Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them,
and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political
warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness
and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them
generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion; and when they
strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned
with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head
which they have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason
to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the
triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be
pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was
it without something like regret and shame that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining
office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first
that fell.

The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious
a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the
sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of the accident
which has befallen him. In my particular case the consolatory topics
were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my
meditations a considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In
view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of
resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should
entertain an idea of committing suicide, and although beyond his hopes,
meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before
in the Old Manse, I had spent three years—a term long enough to rest a
weary brain: long enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make
room for new ones: long enough, and too long, to have lived in an
unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to
any human being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at least,
have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether
ill-pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy; since his
inactivity in political affairs—his tendency to roam, at will, in that
broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than confine
himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same household must
diverge from one another—had sometimes made it questionable with his
brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the
crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the
point might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he
was, it seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the
party with which he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn
survivor, when so many worthier men were falling: and at last, after
subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to
be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet more
humiliating mercy of a friendly one.

Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or
two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like
Irving’s Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried,
as a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real
human being all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had
brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for
the best; and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had
opened his long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary man.

Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and
undoubtedly should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating
effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution,
and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is no
indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer’s mind:
for he was happier while straying through the gloom of these sunless
fantasies than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of
the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have
likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils
and honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals
and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone round the
circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the metaphor of the
political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS
PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch which I am now
bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to
publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who
writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing
on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of
quiet!

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector—who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly have lived for
ever—he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at
the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view: white-headed and
wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung
aside for ever. The merchants—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton,
Kimball, Bertram, Hunt—these and many other names, which had such
classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of traffic,
who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world—how little
time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act,
but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and
appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom
upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it;
as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in
cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses
and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for—though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary
efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a
pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my
forefathers—there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a
literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind.