The story takes place in New England during the colonial development of North America, where the powerful Colonel Pynchon takes over a piece of land belonging to a villager, Moore, and then fabricates a crime and executes Moore as a witch. Before his death, Moore placed a curse on Pynchon: "God will call for his blood!" Colonel Pynchon builds a lavish seven-cornered building on the land. On the very day of the celebration of the completion of the Seven Corners House, the colonel inexplicably died in his room. The descendants of Colonel Pynchon who have lived in the house since then have suffered the same misfortune as he did, and 150 years later there is only one member of the Pynchon family living in the Heptagonal House - the old lady, Hephzibah, and a young tenant, Mr. Holgrave. Hephzibah opens a kiosk in a room on the street level of the building, and is joined by her niece, the happy young Phoebe, and her brother, Clifford, who has been in prison for a long time on false charges. But Judge Jaffrey Pynchon, a cousin of Hippogriff's, who had always badgered them in order to force Clifford to tell where an important family deed was fabled to be hidden, ended up dying a violent death in the parlor of the Seven Corners House, just as old Colonel Pynchon had done. Judge Pynchon's estate is eventually inherited by Phoebe, Clifford, and Hapojiba, and Holgrave's life is made public; he is a descendant of the Moore family, but instead of ever exacting any kind of vengeance on the family, he falls in love with Phoebe in good faith. In the end, the four of them leave the Seven Corners together and go to the countryside to start a new life.
Selected Works
Judging from Clifford's plain emotional inertia or asexuality, he would probably be happy to live endlessly, day in and day out, in the kind of way we described earlier - or at least through the summer. Phoebe, however, feeling that an occasional change of scenery might be beneficial to him, sometimes suggested that he look outward to the life in the streets. For this purpose they had once climbed the stairs together to the second story of the mansion, where, at the end of a wide entrance, there was a vaulted window of extraordinary width, covered with two curtains. The window opened over the veranda, and had originally had a balcony, the railings of which had long since decayed and been removed. Behind this vaulted window, pushing it open, but half covering himself by the curtains, Clifford was enabled to have an opportunity of witnessing a corner of the great world that rolled on like a torrent-a secluded street in a city of small population. But he and Phoebe saw, as usual, as much as could be shown anywhere in the city worth seeing. Pale-faced, gray-haired, old and childish, melancholy but often simply pleasant, and sometimes a little wise, Clifford peered out from behind the faded scarlet curtains-observed the monotonous daily minutiae with a kind of bored amusement and sincerity, and, at every tiny stirring of his emotions turned back to seek ****ing in the eyes of the voluptuous maiden!
If Clifford had been able to sit properly by the window for a while, Penchin Street could hardly have been described as lonely and tedious, and looking along it he would always have found something somewhere that would have caught his eye and made him scratch his ears, if not his eyes. Things that were familiar even to a child, things that were already established facts of life, still seemed new and strange to him. A hired carriage; a public **** carriage packed with people, stopping here and there, getting down one passenger, getting up another, the great rolling car that was so symbolic of the world, whose journey's end was everywhere and nowhere; his eyes followed them eagerly, but not before the dust raised by the horses' hoofs and wheels had fallen back onto the driveway, and he had already forgotten about it all. up. His mind seemed to lose its power of grasping and retaining when new things (hired carriages and public **** carriages should be counted) were involved. For instance, a water-wheeler drove past Panchin House two or three times in the course of the day, leaving a wide trail of water on the ground, covering the white dust raised by a lady's lightest footing; the water-wheeler sprinkled water like a summer shower, and the municipal authorities, taking advantage of the situation, compelled it to sprinkle as a matter of easy routine for them. With this water-cart Clifford could in no way be familiarized; it always amazed him as if he had seen it for the first time. It had evidently made a distinct impression upon his mind, but before the reappearance of this revolving waterwheel, as if the streets had never been sprinkled and immediately white dust had steamed up with the heat, he had forgotten all about it. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear the clamorous hissing of the steaming monster, and, peering slightly out of the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the string of carriages crossing at the end of the street. The lurid notion of energy so imposed upon him was so new each time it appeared that for the hundredth time it still seemed to make him feel as out of place and as astonished in almost equal measure as the first.
The sadness of loss or levitation of the ability to cope with the unaccustomed and remain in sync with the flight of time could not be greater. It can only be a momentary mood swing; for if this ability were to disappear when it does, immortality would be nonsense. Whenever such a catastrophe befalls us, we are not yet, for the present, ghosts.
The conservatism of Clifford is indeed y rooted. All the quaint sights of the street were dear to him, even if there were rude features in them that rightly bored his discriminating sensibilities. He loved the rattling, creaking cars, and he could still find in his long-buried memory the ruts which they had rolled out in earlier days, just as the observer of to-day finds the old wheel-tracks which remain in Herculaneum. The fresh-meat wagons with their snow-white tops were an acceptable sight; there were the fishmongers' wagons accompanied by the sound of the conch-horn; and there was likewise the countryman's vegetable wagons, driving slowly from door to door, the horse pulling the wagons waiting patiently for its owner to sell the turnips and carrots, the summer squash, the string beans, the green peas, and fresh potatoes, for which half the housewives of the neighborhood were buying. The van, with its coarse musical bells, lifted Clifford's spirits, for it, like few other things, vibrated with the dissonance of the past. One afternoon a scissor-sharpener just happened to have set up his grinding wheel under the Panchin elm and was at the gable-roofed window. The children swarmed about with their mother's scissors or meat cleavers, their father's shaving-knives, or anything else that was not sharp enough (except, of course, poor Clifford's dulled wits), in order that the sharpener might put them on his magical grinding-wheel, and have them as good as new when he handed them back. The grinder stamps it with his foot, and the machine busily revolves, grinding away the steel on the hardened stone. A long, strong, irritating sibilant noise arose as fierce as that of Satan and his companions in hell, except that the spray was smaller. It was one of those ugly, little vipers of noise that always do little harm to the human ear. Yet Clifford listened to it with ecstasy. The noise, however unappealing, whose life, after all, was short, together with the circle of curious children watching the spinning of the grinding wheel, seemed to make him feel more distinctly than on any other occasion the presence of an active and bright vitality. Its charm, however, lingered mainly in the past, for the sizzle of the grinder's wheel echoed only to his childhood ears.
He sometimes bemoans the fact that there are no public ****ing stagecoaches today. He asked, in a wounded tone, what had become of the light wagons, drawn by plow horses driven by peasant women and village girls, the square-roofed wagons with the wheels jutting out on the sides, that used to haul European lingonberries and blackberries around town for sale. Gone, he says, are the wagons, and he wonders if strawberries don't grow in the vast prairies and along the shaded country roads.
But nothing that arouses the sense of beauty, in however humble a way, need be held up by such old associations. This can be seen in the way an Italian boy (who is a rather fashionable embellishment on our street) came along with his accordion on his side, and stood up in the cool, broad shade of an elm tree. With a quick glance of the connoisseur's eye he instantly noticed two faces gazing at him from an arched window, and opened his instrument to spread foreign tunes. Over his shoulder reclined a monkey in the national costume of the Scottish Highlands; and, to add to the glowing attraction of his appearance before the public, he had prepared a band of villains, whose place of activity and residence was in the mahogany box of his accordion, and whose rule of life was the shaking out of the music on which the Italians earned their living. Their occupations vary from one to another-shoemaker, blacksmith, soldier, noblewoman with a fan in her hand, drunkard with a bottle of wine, milkmaid sitting by the cow-and this fortunate little community may be said to be content to exist in a harmony that makes life a a dance on the ground. The Italian lad turned a crank; hey, look! Every little person began to move in the strangest manner. The shoemaker made a shoe; the blacksmith struck his iron; the soldier waved his glittering bayonet; the noblewoman lifted her fan and fanned the breeze; the merry drunkard drank from his mouth to the bottle; the scholar opened his book with a thirst for knowledge, and bobbed his head back and forth to the pages; the milkmaid milked her cow with all her might; and the money-grubber counted the gold coins and threw them into his strong box--all at the same time. -all these movements were performed at the same cranking of the crank. Yes, in the same crank a lover kisses his sweetheart in honor! In this pantomime scene, there is probably some cynicism in the simultaneous expression of merriment and pain, which is intended to show that we mere mortals, whatever our occupations, whatever our pleasures-serious or trivial-dance to the same tune, and that, in spite of our hilarious behavior, we are all in the same business, and that we are all in the same way. Despite our hilarious behavior, we will ultimately accomplish nothing. In the most striking aspect of this state of affairs, when the music ceases, all are at once transformed from the most licentious of lives into stupefied drunkards. It did not matter whether the shoemaker's shoe was finished, or the blacksmith's iron formed; nor whether a drop of brandy was missing from the drunkard's bottle, or a drop of milk from the milkmaid's pail, or a gold coin from the rich man's stout money-box, or a scholar's page of a book was turned. Everything goes back, without a hitch, to what it was before they were so ridiculously laboring, enjoying themselves, accumulating gold, and seeking wisdom. And the sad thing is that the lover is not at all the happier for having been allowed to be kissed by his beloved! However, instead of swallowing that last too pungent spice mentioned above, we reject the whole oracle of this performance.
At this point the monkey curled its stubby tail out from underneath that costume, stretched it to an incredible length, and took its place at the Italian boy's feet. It turned an unappealing little wrinkled face towards every passer-by and the circle of children that rapidly gathered round, towards the door of Hepojiba's store, and up towards the arched window at which Phoebe and Clifford were looking down. It also took off its Highlander's hat from time to time, and with one leg rubbing the ground it stepped back to bend and bow. Sometimes it even stretched out its small, black paws and asked for things, either in a blatant display of its insatiable greed for whatever whatever dirty money any random person might have in their pockets. The humble *** and surprisingly human expression of its wrinkled face, the prying and cunning glance that exudes a readiness to seize every pitifully favorable moment, its enormous tail (too large to be decently concealed under a suit of Wadatan) and its sinister nature-in short, you could not have expected a better symbol of the monkey as a matter of fact than he was. possibly expect a more symbolic image of the crudest god of covetousness with a taste for money, nor is there any possibility of gratifying this greedy little devil: Phoebe scattered a handful of coins, and instead of appearing pleased, it simply picked them up in a hurry, handed them to the Italian to deposit, and then immediately made a series of gestures begging for more.
Doubtless more than one New Englander - or, I fear, whatever his nationality - has passed by, glanced at the monkey, and gone on his way again, without thinking how truly his own moral intentions are here being demonstrated. how truly exemplified. Clifford, however, was of another sort. He felt a childlike pleasure in the music, and smiled at the little people who moved to it. But, after looking for a moment at the little devil with the long tail, he was so y struck by its ugliness of form and spirit, that he even began to weep when he really did; and such weakness is unavoidable in those who are born delicate, and lacking in the wilder, deeper, and sadder laughter, when confronted with the worst and vilest side of life.
There are times when Panchin Street is enlivened by a more solemn spectacle than that described above, and thus a greater stream of people walking about. As soon as the throng and the noise of this traffic was loud enough to reach Clifford's ear drums, he was seized by a powerful impulse, and had an out-of-place thrill at the idea of personal contact with the outside world. This became apparent one day when a political procession took place: hundreds of flags fluttered and waved, gongs and drums rang out, music boomed, and they marched through rows of buildings all over the city; and a prolonged thumping of footsteps and highly unusual shouts echoed through the usually quiet seven tipi-topped mansions. For a sight alone, a procession through a narrow street has no ornamental value. We, the spectators, thought it a fool's errand, as we took in the flat, dull countenance of each man: the perspiration dripping from their faces, the look of weary self-respect, the cut of their breeches, the color of their shirts, and the straight or loose appearance of their shirts, and the dust on the backs of their black coats, all indicated it. The procession should be viewed from some optimum angle in order to appear spectacular, such as that which would allow the long procession to walk slowly through the center of an open plain, or the public **** square of the most stately city; for in this case, as far as the eye can see, each good-looking individual participating in the parade has merged into the single presence of the great mass of people--by the one vast and single spirit inspired by one great being, one human collective. But on the other hand, if a susceptible man stands alone in the close proximity of such a procession, and instead of distinguishing each separate individual, sees it as a whole - as a rolling stream of life, surging forward, mysterious to the point of obscurity, and calling from its depths the ****ing of his heart --, and this close viewing increases the effect, fascinating him to the core, and making it difficult to contain the streams of sympathy that well up.
Clifford's behavior at that moment was proof of this. He trembled around and turned white; he cast a pleading glance at Hephzibah and Phoebe, who stood with him by the window. They understood nothing of his feelings, and thought him only disturbed by the unaccustomed commotion. At length he rose on trembling limbs, set one foot on the sill, and in a moment would have been on the balcony without parapets. Indeed, the whole parade might have seen his wild, untamed form, his locks of gray hair fluttering in the wind that blew the flags, and the man who had been alone and alienated from the others, felt for the moment, by the instincts that irresistibly seized him, that he was a man again. Clifford, if he had been on the balcony, had probably jumped into the street; yet whether driven by that peculiar fear which sometimes impels its victims to cross daunting floors, or attracted by that natural magnetism which throws them into the great centers of the crowd, it is difficult to determine. Possibly both impulses acted upon him at the same time.
But his two companions, terrified by his gesture--which was a defiant rush forward--at once seized him by the robes and yanked him back. Hepojiba screamed. Phoebe, a man who fears all out-of-circle behavior, huffed and puffed at this point.
"Clifford, Clifford! Are you crazy?" His sister exclaimed.
"I can't tell, Hippogriffa," said Clifford, drawing a long breath. "There's nothing to be afraid of,-it's over now,-but if I'd jumped and hadn't died, I suppose it would have turned me into another man!"
In one sense Clifford may have been right. He needed to be shocked for once; perhaps he needed to plunge deep into the ocean of life, to be drowned y, and then to surface again, to regain his clear head and his full energy, and to re-enter the world of life. Perhaps what he needs is still no more than that great last cure - death!
A similar longing to renew the broken ties of brotherhood with his loved ones has sometimes shown itself in milder forms; and at one time was beautifully inspired by a more y buried religion. In the incident now described, on the part of Clifford, there is a touching recognition of the care and love which God had bestowed upon him; and as the poor outcast had been abandoned, forgotten, and thrown as a plaything into the hands of some mischievous devil, it was understandable that, as God had been merciful to him, so might mortal man be merciful to him.
It was Sunday morning, a clear, serene Sunday, with its own hollow atmosphere, and the heavens seemed to merge themselves into the surface of the earth with a solemn smile of a sweetness that was nothing less than solemn. On such a Sunday morning, if we are pure enough agents, we should realize that wherever we stand, the natural reverence of the earth penetrates upward into our bodies and strikes a different tone. And in perfect harmony the church bells, echoing each other, call out, "It's Sunday! --Sunday! --Yes; Sunday!" The bells rang all over the city, spreading a blessing, sometimes slowly, sometimes with angry gaiety, sometimes with one bell ringing, sometimes with all the bells ringing in unison, calling sincerely, "It's Sunday!" The sound was thrown far and wide, melting into the air, permeated with sacred words. The air with God's sweetest, gentlest sunshine was breathed into the heart for mankind, and then exhaled with prayer.
Clifford and Hephzibah sat by the window and watched their neighbors step out into the street. All of them, however listless they might have been on other days, had been transformed by the call of Sunday, so that their dress - whether it was a decent coat that had been carefully brushed a thousand times by an old man, or a little boy's first top and pants that had been sewn up by his mother just yesterday- - had a more or less ascensionist feel to it. -all more or less in the nature of ascending robes and garments. From the front porch of the old mansion also stepped Phoebe, holding up her little green parasol, and looking up to cast a glance and a kindly farewell smile at the two faces that showed in the gable-roofed window. There was an easy rapture in her, and a sanctity you might jest at, and a dignity as usual. She was like a praying woman, asking for heaven in her kind and beautiful native tongue. Phoebe was not only fresh, but her dress was cheerful and sweet, as if the clothes she wore--whether it was a gown, or a bonnet, or a little handkerchief, or snowy stockings--had never been put on before; or if they had been worn before, they looked fresh to-day, and as if they were with the rose-buds. and still smelled as if they had been stored with rose-buds.
The girl waved one hand to Hephzibah and Clifford, and walked up the street; she was herself the embodiment of religion, homely, simple, and true, with a solidity capable of walking on the ground and a spirit capable of ascending to heaven.
"Hippogriffa," said Clifford, as he watched Phoebe go to the corner, "do you never go to church?"
"Don't go, Clifford!" She replied, "Not in all these years!"
"Shouldn't I go," he continued, "as I see it, since there are so many human souls around praying, I can pray again too!"
She stared into Clifford's face, and saw that a touch of tenderness flowed naturally from her heart, and that her eyes were full of reverence for God and fraternal love for her brothers on earth. This emotion was communicated to Hephzibah. She longed for the thought of taking his hand and the two of them kneeling down together - the two of them had been too long isolated from the world and, as she realized only at this moment, could not claim to be his friends in heaven anymore - kneeling down in the midst of the people and reconciling themselves at the same time to God and to others.
"Dear brother," she said fervently, "let us go! We don't belong anywhere. We have not a place on our knees in any church; but let us go to a place where God is worshipped, even if we stand in a wide aisle. We are already so poor and forlorn that the doors of the church will be open to us!"
And so Hephzibah and her brother got ready - they put on their best old-fashioned robes, all long hanging on pegs or in trunks, covered with the damp and musty smell of old age - and assumed his shriveled and best likeness ready for church. As soon as they started down the stairs-the wan, vegetable-colored Hepojiba and the pale, decrepit, age-ravaged Clifford! They pulled open the front door and stepped over the threshold, and both felt as if they stood before the whole world, which was gazing at them both with the terrible wide eyes of mankind. It was as if the gaze of their heavenly Father had withdrawn and offered them no encouragement. The warm, sun-filled air of the street made them tremble. They trembled inwardly at the thought of taking another step forward.
"We can't go, Hephzibah! -- too late," said Clifford, in deep sorrow. "We are ghosts! We have no right to be among men-no right to go anywhere but in this old mansion, which is cursed, and therefore doomed to let that curse haunt us! Besides," he continued, with that good-natured sensitiveness peculiar to his personality, "it would be neither proper nor elegant for us to go to church! The thought that I would frighten my parishioners, and that the children would cling to their mother's gowns at the sight of me, would be too scandalous!"
They retreated to the dusty walkway and closed the door. But stepping back up the stairs, they found the interior of the mansion simply ten times more somber, and the air more dreary, all as a result of the freedom they had just glimpsed and inhaled. They couldn't escape; their guard had deliberately and mockingly left the door half-open, hiding behind it and staring at them as they sneaked out. They felt his unrelenting grip on them at the door limit. What dungeon could be darker than their own hearts! And what other guards could be as incommunicado as their own!
Yet it would be unfair to Clifford's state of mind if I were to describe him as still or growing more disheveled. On the contrary, we dare affirm that there is no other man in this town who has enjoyed so much carefree ease in half his life as he has. He had no burdens to worry about, none of the troubles and chances which erode the lives of all men with the organization of their prospects, and none of the remorse which follows the vain running about of them. In this respect he was a child-a child in the whole conception of his existence, however long or however short he lived. Indeed, his life seemed to stand still for a period, never a step beyond the stage of childhood, and his memories were all glued to that period; just as in the case of paralysis after a blow, so the memory of the man who has been beaten, after he has regained consciousness, will only go back to a considerable time before the event in which he was struck dumb. Clifford sometimes told Phoebe and Hephzibah of his dreams, in which he always assumed the role of a child, or a young boy. These dreams were very realistic and closely related to him, and once he and his sister quarrelled over a figure or pattern peculiar to a morning dress of polished calico, which he had seen his mother wearing in a dream the night before. Hephzibah, who had a feminine earnestness in such matters, huffily insisted that the dress was slightly different from what Clifford had described; but on taking the morning dress out of an old trunk, it proved that his memory parted. Assuming that Clifford had come out of his dream as if he had gone through the ordeal of passing from a child to a weather-beaten old man, while remaining vigorous, I am afraid that the shock which occurs in everyday life would be too much to bear. For that *** extreme agony would have to begin with the morning sun, and pass through the whole day until bedtime; and even after bedtime there would still be incredible monotonous pains and miseries of a ghastly color, interspersed with the early stages of his slumber. But the dark moonlight of night and the morning mist of dawn were interwoven as a shroud around him, and he clung to it to keep reality from passing through; and he was not so often awake, but slept with his eyes open, fancying, perhaps, that he was in the midst of his deepest dreams.
And so, as he himself was always very close to his childhood, he sympathized with children, and on that account kept a child's heart, like a reservoir, filled only with water from a stream not far from its source. Though he had the least sense of the need to behave decently without demanding to mingle and play with children, there was nothing he liked better than to look out of an arched window and see a little girl rolling a hoop along the sidewalk, or schoolboys playing ball together. He also loved to listen to their childish voices from afar, which buzzed together like flies in a sunlit room.
Undoubtedly, Clifford could not wait to play with them. One afternoon he could hardly restrain himself from blowing soap-bubbles; and Hephzibah whispered to Phoebe on the side that that was a favorite childhood delight of the two siblings. Behold, he actually stood at the vaulted window with a clay pipe in his mouth! Behold, his gray hair waved, and a false smile piled up on his pale face that still retained the grace that had been there for so many years that even his vilest enemies had had to recognize as being with the spirit and long with the life! Behold! He spreads the realm of make-believe from the window to the center of the street! That one soap bubble is the untouchable little world, which on its nothing surface, by virtue of its illusory luster, reflects this great world. Look at how passers-by look at these colorful gadgets floating down from the top of the boring environment around the coloring to attract imagination, is full of fun. Some stopped to stare, or even walked all the way around the corner still happily reminiscing about the soap bubbles; some looked up angrily, as if poor Clifford had violated a taboo by floating a beautiful image so close to their dusty passageway. Many more stretched out their fingers or canes to touch it, and they no doubt received a satisfaction contrary to common sense when the soap-bubbles disappeared into thin air, taking with them the picturesque view of heaven and earth.
Later, just as a very dignified and stately elder happened to be walking by, a large soap bubble floated down divinely and burst right at the tip of the gentleman's nose! He looked up - at first with a stern stare, which immediately bored into the dimness of the vaulted window, and then blossomed into a smile that was enough to dissolve the listless, stifling heat of the space within yards of his head.
"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" Judge Panchin called out. "Hey! Still blowing soap bubbles!"
The tone seemed kindly and soothing, but it had its own bitter irony. Clifford, on the other hand, was instantly paralyzed with fear. In addition to the horror which he was bound to feel out of his previous experience, he experienced the natural and instinctive intimidation which the brilliant judge exerted with great power over a weak and sensitive character. That power was beyond the comprehension of the weak, and therefore all the more horrible. Within the circle of his associates, there was nothing more terrifying to him than a determined relative.
(Translated by Hu Yunhwan)
Appreciation