II

At the age of twenty the student Henry Thoreau left the university with

his bachelor’s degree. This was the recompense for four years passed

away from Concord, four years save for the vacations and the time he

had returned to spend with his family because of ill-health. As for

this title, he may have given it its due--he was certainly not inclined

to over-value it.

Upon entering college, he had left a village environment where equality

was not a joke but a daily observance--left this environment to find

himself, the child of small folk, suddenly thrown among the offspring

of the fortunate ones of this world. In spite of the part-scholarship

which they had obtained for him, his parents, his sister Helen, his

aunts, in order to provide for the cost of his studies, had been

obliged to deprive themselves. At college also, to be sure, a kind of

equality prevailed among the students; but there it was an equality

with a difference. He was a country boy among these wide-awake young

men in whose eyes he was from the village indeed. Since his parents,

his sister, had been obliged to scant themselves to purchase his right

to a share of learning, he was inclined to feel certain things a little

differently from the way he would have felt them if he had been the son

of a senator.

He was assigned to a little room on a top floor of the hive. This was

natural enough. Natural too that the young men in the neighbouring

rooms liked to kick up a shindy when he wanted to work. But it only

made him react the more strongly, and he dreamed.

This environment exhaled an odour that rather annoyed him, not so

much because it had nothing in common with that of the new-mown hay

of the Concord meadows but because it was the odour of an exclusive

humanity, comfortably quartered in first-class state-rooms while the

common passengers made shift as they could between decks. No doubt

there were some charming fellows among these young men, and most of

them were generous enough to treat a poor comrade as if he were one

of themselves. And was it their fault, these college boys, if their

papas travelled in the first class and the atmosphere that surrounded

them was a first-cabin atmosphere? Among these sons of the well-to-do,

future lawyers, future ministers, future diplomats, captains of

industry, pillars of society, Henry felt out of his element. He was

anything but in tune with them. With a secret pride in his plebeian

hands, he exaggerated his reserve, his remoteness, his stiffness in the

presence of these boys who knew so little of the world of toil. The

hand he held out to them was nerveless. He was a Henry always absorbed

in his own thoughts, with his eyes on the ground as if he were seeking

something that did not grow there. He was, indeed, somewhere else.

If he had hardly any real comrades, it was because he had no desire

to make them. These well-dressed, jovial souls, with their special

recreations, their fine parties, their student manners, left him

surprisingly cold. Their sisters, their mothers had not had to deprive

themselves to pay for their studies. He was the son of a little village

shopkeeper, with a soul that already aspired very much higher than the

great stores where they were to lord it.

Besides, he was decidedly rustic in his appearance, this oddly dressed

scholarship-holder. He should have been dressed in black; it was the

rule of the institution. The colleges see the world in black and he was

here to adapt himself to their vision. But the only suit Henry had was

a green one which his father had had made for him at great expense,

and he was obliged to put it on every morning. There were evenings

when, as he undressed, he wished that its greenness were still greener

so as to be even more conspicuous among all these black backs. A good

olive green is less shabby-looking than a black coat that is always

threatening to let you see the thread. You must never let the thread be

seen in this fine black-coated world.

And then in his secret soul homesickness tormented him. Everything he

loved was out there, and it left a great void in his eighteen-year-old

heart. When he heard the thrush singing in the college yard, Harvard

ceased to exist, the library, the examinations he was preparing for....

Nothing remained but a dejected prisoner in his prison. Sometimes, as

he bent over a textbook, the meaning of the words he read was lost

in the sound of the wind that came to him in gusts from the woods of

Concord, and with a wild bound the fancy of the exile leaped over the

wall and sprang towards those dear haunted spots. It required a great

effort to recall the heart-sick fugitive and set himself to work again

in the cell of that austere building. At such moments as these, when

he compared the quality of what he had left behind him and the cost

of what he was acquiring, how could he help feeling in his bitterness

that what he was missing was beyond price? The only remedy was to bury

himself in study. All his free time Henry passed in the library, in

the company of the classics or the old English poets, from Chaucer

to the Elizabethans, who spoke to his solitary heart, a habit that

rendered him still more unsociable and so isolated him that he felt,

in this buzzing community, as if he were doing penance in the desert.

That natural gravity, which had caused him to be nicknamed “the

Judge” by his little playfellows of the village sleighing-parties,

had not been softened by solitary study, his impressions as a college

boy, his loneliness--far from it. The already taciturn child, who had

given himself up to play passionately but with an utter seriousness,

ultra-sensitive to everything that pricked his self-esteem, became

still more self-absorbed the more he grew during these lean years. The

hedgehog remained rolled up. It was as if he had something as precious

as his life to safeguard and was protecting it fiercely. This student

in his little room on the top floor was not one of those creatures that

people tame.

Henry was not conspicuous for his success. He had made a good record in

his studies, working hard to please himself. But in the examinations he

had not shone. It was even remarked, not without surprise, among his

professors, that this studious, gifted boy took no particular pains to

distinguish himself; in the holder of a scholarship this was almost an

offense and they had made him feel it. Thanks to the benefactors of the

college his studies were partly paid for by the revenues of an old farm

which he had to go and collect himself, braving the watch-dogs and the

ill-humour of the unwilling farmer. In any case, it was a favour. A

beneficiary should show his gratitude by exerting himself to the utmost

and carrying off all the honours. When you are poor, you are expected

to make up for this fault by your vigorous performances in composition.

He had read enormously aside from the curriculum and his preparation

for examinations. And he had learned how to express himself. His early

prose exhibits that firmness which is only acquired through a certain

quality of mind after much thought and the assiduous following of the

old masters. In some of his compositions and letters he reveals a

surprising independence, that of a boy who sturdily believes in another

civilization than that of the “civilized” and turns aside from the

beaten roads to follow a road of his own where his instinct directs

him better than the guide-posts. Hear this: “Our Indian is more of a

man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a

man, he dies as a man. The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is

Art’s creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot

educate....” Words of a solitary in the midst of the crowd, written

in a temple of knowledge with the accent of faith and the pungency of

revolt. At eighteen, he does not fear to make an apology for extremism,

denouncing half-way solutions, the herd-spirit, the fear of being

singular, the cowardice that follows the fashion and makes men “mere

tools in the hands of others.” Henry wearing his green coat among the

black costumes, far from apologizing for this incongruity, vigorously

translates it into a rule of conduct. “We are a nation of speculators,

stockholders and money-changers,” he writes before his nineteenth year,

hinting at a native literature still to be born in the New World, “the

establishment of a pure and nervous language.” And at the moment when

he leaves Harvard, he attacks in his Commencement oration the spirit

of lucre, the cur-spirit, with a vivacity, a conviction that slightly

oversteps the tone of university controversy: “Could one examine this

beehive of ours from an observatory among the stars, he would perceive

an unwonted degree of bustle in these later ages.... Where he found

one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place, the ninety and

nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its

surface.... This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than

it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be

admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things should be somewhat

reversed: the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his

living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the

affections and the soul....”

He had emerged from the factory, but it had not succeeded in casting

him in its mould. On the contrary, “the Judge” had judged it. It formed

one of the wheels of a society which he was beginning to understand.

Between mathematics, literature, the classics, the dead languages, some

living truths had crept in, upon which Henry had seized, and he brought

the latter home rolled up in his diploma like some happy find. With

that society there, as it appeared to him, he could have very little to

do. It was a machine of which the fly-wheels, the chains, the pinions

were all too apparent to him. From the whole apparatus falsehood leaked

like a sickening oil. Look sharp, my boy: if you do not, you will be

snapped up.

All this knowledge which he had acquired in his four years of probation

in the factory he measured with a lucid glance. An untutored fellow

with the right quality could put in its place all the science of the

colleges. A flash of the most everyday reality was enough to expose the

poverty of a culture that formed such ignorant beings, such paupers in

the face of life: little gentlemen with white hands who came there to

be confirmed in the pale tradition of their class, “to study chemistry

and not learn how [one’s bread] is made....”

At the same time he had undergone victoriously the ordeal of this

famous culture. It had done him no harm. He regretted nothing:

everything he had acquired, scanty as its weight might be in the

destiny of a man, he would be able to put to his own use, employ for

his own ends. He was going to dispose of knowledge; knowledge was not

to have the best of him. It was a very good thing to possess, as an

additional qualification, like a garment you put on when you need it

and hang up again later when it burdens you. Others might take home

from Harvard the beautiful uniform that people don for a lifetime.

Henry had returned with his old green jacket.

Since he had come back, his family had observed a certain change in his

replies, his attitude, his judgments. This decisive tone of their Henry

and his radical views on the world were a little disturbing to those

good people who had scraped together their dollars to send him off to

college but had never possessed themselves an ounce of rebelliousness.

So that was what they taught at Harvard? Insubordination? His aunts

could hardly believe their ears; their nephew, expressing himself in

this condemnatory fashion? His sister Helen who loved him dearly and

firmly believed in him, Helen who, from her salary as a teacher, had

contributed to pay Henry’s college expenses, even mildly urged him to

moderate his expressions a little. The good girl had her illusions

about the fond authority of an older sister: with his uncompromising

sincerity he ceased for a while to write to her. She had not suspected

that her brother would come home from Harvard with other resources

besides “the old joke of a diploma.” She had remained the same Helen as

ever, and he, after these years, had become a Henry multiplied by four.

In this month of August, 1837, a boy of twenty returned home who had

mastered everything that college had to offer, in the books and outside

the books. No need to press on to an A.M.; he knew quite enough. In

this respect, if not in others, the years at Harvard were certainly

worth the sacrifices that Helen and the father and the good aunts had

made. The certitudes he had brought back were even worth the sacrifice

the college boy had made of his free years of adolescence.

* * * * *

And now the problem was to earn his bread. The “old joke of a diploma”

might help him just the same in finding a livelihood.

Since his final return to Concord, his father had undertaken a new

business. He was manufacturing pencils. After the grocery and the

odd-jobbing, this was a step up: a manufacturer, the creator of that

beautiful thing, the hard casing with its marrowy flesh that a pencil

is, destined to the noblest uses--reckoning up accounts, taking notes,

drawing. For twenty years a pencil factory had existed at Concord when

John Thoreau cleverly bethought himself of setting up in competition.

It was rather bold for a little man who had been so unlucky hitherto

and had such slender resources.

Before his college years and during his long vacations, Henry had lent

a hand in the paternal workshop. It was their means of livelihood and

the aid of the two boys was necessary. They worked together under the

name of “John Thoreau and Son.” At the end of the summer of 1836, when

a serious illness had obliged him to return home for several months,

Henry had even accompanied his father to New York, whither they went

to put their merchandise on the market. It was his first visit to the

great metropolis, this visit as a commercial traveller who had come to

offer the city folk an article that had issued from his village hands.

The people of the metropolis obtained the softest and most perfect

pencils directly from Europe; would they have any use for his stuff?

Wait, you people of the metropolis, you spoiled folk who are so hard to

please, one of these days we are going to show you something just as

perfect, something better than your beautiful pencils from abroad.

But this was no sort of destiny for a college boy. Not for the sake

of manufacturing pencils had he spent four years in college at the

expense of his family. It would be disloyal to defeat their hopes,

and circumstances at home were in rather a bad way. Now that he had

his degree he would have to try something else. His Aunt Louisa was a

schoolmistress, and so was Helen; John was very clever at teaching.

They set him his example. Why should not he attempt the same thing?

Why not, indeed? This was the first experiment to be tried with the

armament of the “old joke.”

As a matter of fact, he had already had some experience in teaching.

During his long college vacations, to assist his family in paying the

other half of his expenses, he had followed the custom of students who

are not born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and taught a little,

as an assistant master, in the neighbouring villages; visiting in this

way at Canton, just outside Boston, he had even learned a little German

from the minister with whom he had stayed. This had brought him in a

few dollars, and he had studied himself while he was teaching others.

And now the time had come to find employment as a schoolmaster. To find

such a position at Concord itself would be ideal, and it so happened

that there was a vacancy in the Town School and he was accepted. In

September, the month after his return, he was established there.

So there he was, one of the wheels of the machine. The respectable

citizens had confided their children to him to teach them, not simply

the three R’s, but sound principles as well. It was the immemorial

Christian custom to inculcate sound principles upon the young by means

of the rod. Henry, however, was not the flogging kind. He was going

to talk to the young hopefuls as young hopefuls, appealing to their

feelings as good boys. Everything went well or seemed to be going well;

but there were eyes on the watch. These eyes saw what this innovation

was leading to, the ruin of the moral foundations upon which Concord

and the world rested. The master, this enemy of rods, had to reckon

with the committee in charge of the school, one of whom was a certain

Deacon--that same worthy man perhaps who also kept a store and with

whom, not long before, the elder Thoreau had served his commercial

apprenticeship. He or his like, it matters little: a guardian of the

sound traditions. Whereupon His Morality the Deacon represented to the

young master that his method was a menace to the discipline of the

school. It was inadmissible. Henry had been appointed to a function

that included the ritual distribution of the rod to scholars who

deserved it. There were always in a class scholars who deserved the

rod. He did not see them. He was not carrying out his function.

Very well. Since flogging formed a part of the work ordained in

exchange for a salary, that very day the master took at random and

punished conscientiously six boys of whom one at least was never to

know what had suddenly seized this gentle master and was to cherish a

bitter memory of him.... So there, Henry has earned his money. And now,

good-bye, Deacon, good-bye, all of you. Go and find another master who

will flog your school for you.... Henry had been a teacher for fifteen

days. The wheel had hardly been put in place before it had sprung off.

Too bad, but he could go back to pencil-making. It was not exactly the

thing he had dreamed of, but it was free work into which the Deacons

did not thrust their pious noses. If he was obliged to ply the ferule

to earn his living, he would go and pick huckleberries and sell them

in the market. Or fish for pike and peddle them in the village, or take

up any sort of work that wouldn’t oblige him to report to committeemen.

In spite of all this, he still wanted a school. He had the ability and

it meant independence. Working with his father, he was a help, but he

was dependent on his family, and they found it hard enough to make

ends meet. The fall, the winter passed. How much he would have liked

to go out and snatch a little air! There were moments like that. The

surroundings of his childhood had been so dear to him that, stoical

as he was by nature, the tears came to his eyes at the thought that

some day he might have to leave them. But people had affronted him; he

loathed his fellow-villagers. He wanted to push out into the world.

But he wanted to go with John. To set out without John would be to

sacrifice the best part of himself. For John was much more than his

brother, he was the cream of all possible brothers. John the third was

a delightful being who made him think that his grandfather, John the

first, had crossed the ocean simply to prepare for his coming and make

Concord an inestimable gift. John was a true Thoreau like Helen but

with an exquisite charm, a flavour that belonged to him alone. Gifted

as he was, none of his other gifts was equal to this faculty of making

himself loved. He was a warm presence like a ray of sunlight and the

freest-hearted companion to work with or to go off with, hunting,

exploring--the two of them, Indian chiefs, older brother, younger

brother, similar in their tastes, the gaiety of the one multiplied

by the happiness of the other. Everything became possible, easy,

everything brightened up, when John was with you. Would Concord have

been Concord if Henry had not explored it and made it his own, during

the whole of his childhood, with this perfect play-fellow?

Spring broke. Helen and Sophia would soon be leaving to take up their

teaching at Roxbury. John was at present a schoolmaster at Taunton.

Henry wrote to him. A friend of the family, settled in the West,

assured him that they could have a fine situation if they were to go

out there and open a school. What if they were to set off together?...

What do you say, brother? If we were to go out there and set up a

_real_ cabin, far away from these deacons and respectable numskulls,

in some raw, half-built town or out on the open prairie? We could

borrow money for the expenses of the journey, and as for the rest we

have workingman’s hands, we are not afraid of adventure, we could pull

through. What couldn’t we do, the two of us together?... Henry was

pressing. Stagnation weighed on him; on the river the ice was breaking.

He longed to undertake something. It was high time to begin. And if his

brother was willing.... A few weeks later he heard of a school that was

going to be opened in Virginia. He was certainly going down there if

they wanted him.... And soon after the question of another school came

up, in Maine, where his cousins were. He went up there and came back

the same hungry Henry as before, in spite of the brilliant certificate

he was able to show, signed with fine names, among them R. W. Emerson.

Well, then, if they didn’t want him and his diploma anywhere he would

change his plans. That was settled. His father and mother lived in a

house in the centre of the village: it was big enough for them to open

a private school there. John and Henry would teach at home, free from

all prying committees. They counted on finding pupils.

They did not count in vain. They had four already, and the promise

of a fifth. Henry, urged to begin in June, had not waited for his

brother’s arrival. As soon as the latter came he took over the

direction of the school. Henry took charge of the Latin, Greek, French,

physics and mathematics. They were so successful that they were obliged

to think of moving the school for the following year: their father’s

house was no longer big enough to hold it. Just then the building of

the Academy, where Henry had been prepared for college, became vacant,

and they took up quarters there. It looked as if the Thoreau school was

going to become the Academy. But not to underrate its masters, when had

the latter ever had such a director? A John, with this art of teaching

children and understanding a school as John understood it?

Very strange, the method of the two brothers. They obtained discipline

without punishment or threats. How did they manage this? All the

deacons in New England might well ask. They interested their pupils,

won them, attached them to themselves by a living bond, that between

the man-child and the child-man. Study ceased to be a mere heaping up

of ennui and constraint; it was a conversation between brothers. With

the money which the rod would have cost they had bought a little common

sense and good will; and though the pedants could not pardon these two

presumptuous souls, the pupils worked, the pupils stayed. Boys of ten

to fifteen came to listen to the two young masters, the elder of whom

had made them promise, when they entered, to do their best, and the

boys kept their promise because they were listening to a master who was

their friend. If they missed now and then, the punishment was to remind

them that they had not kept their word. No one dreamed of playing

pranks, yawning with misery or pulling wings off flies when the master

told stories or prolonged the recess playing with the boys himself.

The delightful invitations of the out-of-doors were less tantalizing

in a class where penal tasks were unknown. Outside the lessons there

was an attachment between the young master and the pupils created by a

thousand little subtle bonds such as ordinary pedagogues, with their

crass ignorance and their ferules, cannot imagine.

You arrived at school in the morning and, opening your desk, you found

a beautiful slice of melon there. You thought it was a joke that one of

the boys was playing on you. Not at all: John, your teacher, knowing

that you had a sweet tooth, was unostentatiously offering you a taste

of the melons from his garden; he was proud of them, for he and his

brother raised them, and this year they had a wonderful crop. A slice

of melon adds to study a taste which the poor imagination of the

pedants knows nothing of. It is refreshing, delectable, and the flavour

lingers in the lesson you are reciting. Especially the kind of melons

that John and Henry raised--those succulent citron-melons.

Besides, the school did not consist entirely in the lectures, the

lessons and the compositions. It spread out to include the more

familiar concerns before, after class, during recess, in the street. If

you came across John outside school, you ran to meet him of your own

accord, joined him and went part of the way with him. He was grown up,

your professor, but you were not afraid of him, for his friendliness

effaced these distances. Henry, who taught the big boys, had a colder,

soberer air; when you saw him going by, you had no desire to joke with

this personage who knew Greek and Latin. But you had only to wait till

you became his pupil. When you knew him better, how much you wanted to

overtake him too in the street after class and walk along with him,

hand in hand, and how much you were rewarded by the stories and the

amusing things he told you! Henry was as much your friend as John.

At school they also studied surveying--a beautiful chance to go out

for a walk and have lessons in the open country. Henry was the one who

showed the boys how to draw up a plan. And one afternoon each week

they had school in the open air; the whole crew, masters and pupils,

poured out into the woods, plunged into the meadow grass, for the most

enlightening of object-lessons. Then which of them all was more of a

boy than Henry? Which was the fastest runner? The most indefatigable

gatherer of huckleberries? The most enraptured of them all? Anyone who

saw him exulting with this troop of schoolchildren would have said that

it was he who poured this childlike zest into the others, as if he

possessed an inexhaustible store. You, teacher of Greek and Latin, will

never be, under your grave airs, anything but a youngster. They are not

mistaken, the good people who say this, smiling disdainfully as they

see you pass. For they are men, austere, dignified men, weighed down by

cares, exhaling an odour of old prayer-books and warranty deeds.

Sometimes Henry carried off a pupil for a swim in a pond or a boating

party on the river; they made discoveries; they landed on unknown

shores. All this was part of the school and helped to keep up the

spirit of comradeship. One day young Edmund Sewall took his place in

the boat--Edmund, who was so like his big sister Ellen of whom John and

Henry were particularly fond. Ellen was the daughter of the minister

of Scituate. Her grandmother and her aunt, old friends of the family,

boarded with the Thoreaus; and when the girl came to Concord to see

them, gay parties were organised and they had beautiful evenings at

home. Ellen’s fresh seventeen years had made an impression on the two

brothers. But it was the lovable John especially who made an impression

on her. Presently he had in his class this young Edmund, whose charm

haunted him and to whom he was devoted because behind the child’s face

rose that of the big sister, his play-fellow, the thought of whom

sometimes made him dream and gave him the desire to say to the pupil

tender things that might have been addressed equally well to her.

At home they met again, for the Thoreaus boarded and lodged those

youngsters whose parents did not live in the village. They sat at the

same table, masters, pupils, boarders, old friends, and the vivacity of

the mother presided over the family meal. It was no banquet, for they

had neglected to be rich, but the bread tasted better than elsewhere,

and the vegetables came from the garden. The school was only a step

from the house. They carried the homelike atmosphere over with them. Is

that why the memory of these years--years in which two brothers, in a

village, taught them what they knew--was to flavour the whole lives of

those who had passed through the Thoreau school? You worked well there,

better than anywhere else, and the study left no musty taste behind

it. What was John and Henry’s secret? They were no lesson-mongers. And

so when the parents of a pupil who interested them found it difficult

to pay for his studies they asked the parents to let them keep him for

nothing. Let him come and work with the others; time enough to talk

about money later.

Nor did the pupils take up all their time. The day is long when you are

twenty-five; it knows how wonderful it is and turns slowly, slowly,

so as to give you the leisure to admire all its aspects. The hours

of school left a beautiful margin of independence: the morning, the

very early morning, the glorious late afternoons in summer, and the

Sundays, and the vacations! When Henry had finished in the garden, put

to rights this or that little matter in the house, off he went! All

the surroundings of Concord awaited him. The woods were waiting for

him, the fish in the river, those luxuriant plants, swollen with sap,

which nobody ever looked at, on the edge of the marsh. He had to go and

get the latest news of them. So Henry seized his gun and set off on a

stroll through the woods. Perhaps to-day he would bring back some rare

bird to study, for he had a true passion for the birds, the plants, and

all the creatures of the open air. In any case, he would undoubtedly

bring back something, if only the certainty of his own happiness in

the woods. This man who was setting out, with his gun on his shoulder,

for the fields, was no common huntsman in quest of game; he might

not take a single shot with his gun, but he would not return with an

empty bag. There are different kinds of good hunting. The discoveries,

the surprises, the confirmations, an attention awakened by a certain

phenomenon do not fill your game-bag, but fur and feathers would not

satisfy you half so much. Henry would pick up an Indian arrow-head to

add to his collection. His brother and he were immensely interested

in these finds. One day, as a token of their respect for the red

aborigines who had once been the kings of the country, they raised a

cenotaph to the memory of a sachem on Fairhaven Hill, where they had

often come as boys to watch the sunrise. They were fond of the names

the former rulers had left everywhere, full of the calls of animals,

twittering birds, murmuring winds, gliding waters, roaring cataracts.

Henry took his fishing-rod and set out through the fields in search of

a good nook on the river. He might perhaps bring back some fish. But to

catch fish, when he went fishing, was not, after all, the finest part

of the adventure. The river had many other presents to make him besides

its fish. He even had fishing-parties when the fish were only an

unimportant incident, as, for example, on a calm, warm evening, when he

set off with an eel-spear, at the break of spring, before the fish had

begun to hide among the tall reeds or in the deep water. He fastened a

grating to the bow of his boat, a yard above the water, where he burned

resinous roots. From a distance it looked like a will-o’-the-wisp in

the meadows. For himself, in the boat, armed with his long harpoon,

it was like sailing in the midst of enchantment. The water was so

violently illumined over a large space all round the bow that he

could stare down many feet into the depths and surprise the fish in

the inmost recesses of their hiding-places. Strange sojourners, some

of whom seemed to be asleep or dreaming, others very wide-awake, the

latter ferocious in their aspect, the former on their backs as if they

were floating ... They had so little fear of the monster who brandished

the iron and the fire over their abodes that he could have caught them

with a fork, as you spear a potato in the pot, or could even seize

the sleepers with his hand. But as he was not a mere brute, the most

thrilling thing was not the basket of fish he might have brought home

but the spectacle itself, the supernatural beauty of the reflexions

of the flames in the water, on the willows and the pines on the bank.

Surprised by this brutal dawn, a song-sparrow wakened and began to sing

as if it were morning--singing for Henry who, in this raw glow that

cut the shadows, rowed along in silence, groping his way, listening,

meditating....

Most radiant of all were the times when he left gun, fishing-rod, boat

and harpoon behind for a simple ramble on foot when the earth seemed

to respond to the pressure of his soles and his being dilated as if

all the good news carried through space were addressed especially to

him. This is what Henry felt every time he explored the country of his

childhood, in hours of liberty, finding once more the old confidences

and secret favours in those nooks he had left behind in the days of his

homesickness.

Invariably the schoolmaster’s day closed with another escape. Every

evening, before going to bed, he gathered together, worked over,

expressed with the greatest exactness to a sure and discreet confidant

the most secret impressions of the day. Since his return from Harvard

he had formed the habit of this daily rendezvous with this other self

who never betrayed him and would never bore him with complaints and

expostulations but accepted everything. Later on, this was going to

be an unexceptionable witness when, published to the world, it would

reply to those who questioned it. The solitude of the college years

had developed in him a natural tendency to examine himself--the taste

for the inner dialogue. All the knowledge we acquire through study or

the society of others will never compensate for our indifference where

our own souls are concerned. This is a subject for study that is worth

all the pains you devote to it--a book that is of more importance for

you to read than those that lie on your shelf. And this over and above

the fact that when you have read it you will be prepared to understand

other books and other men. Henry was anxious to know where he stood in

relation to himself. An orderly man does not go to bed without making

up his accounts.

Henry confided to his Journal his intimate thoughts, his discoveries

of the day. He reckoned up his stock. To what end? He would see later

on. In the meantime, a man who was aware of what he possessed slipped,

with his spirit at peace, into sheets that were as white as the page of

to-morrow.

* * * * *

To have the good luck to be born on the brink of two rivers, to be

twenty years, twenty-five years old, to have a hearty, open-air

appetite, and not to have a boat, is a flaw in the happiness of a man.

Fishing or swimming, loafing about the banks or skating on its firm

back, you have never known the joy of the river if it has not taken you

and rocked you, led you, carried you off, made you dance at its own

will and pleasure.

If you were to build a boat?... You can find the timber, you have a few

tools and fingers that know how to handle a piece of wood. A real boat.

Not a mere dugout such as Henry had made when he was nineteen, a dugout

that looked like an oblong trough, though even that was better than a

tub in which you drift with the current; it was delightful; it did not

move swiftly, but with patience and skill you could risk yourself in it

for a quarter of an hour’s adventure. No, a real boat this time, a boat

that really travels over the water. If you bought one, or had it built

by a boat-builder, you would spend a lot of money and have nothing but

the joy of the boat itself; whereas if you made it with your own hands

you would also have the joy of building it.

To assemble your materials for building a boat in the open air, in the

first days of spring, is a very different pleasure from expounding the

Odyssey; you feel as if you were living like a man of Homer’s day, you

inhale in advance the scent of discovery. To wield the saw and the

hammer, take your careful measurements, fit together the pieces of

the body, see the work taking form, to be two brothers under the sky,

busy in your dock-yard, among your tools, your timber, striking with

precision, trimming neatly, responsible to nobody--schoolmaster as you

are, the gods that roam New England on their tour of inspection might

envy you, those gods who have never had the joy of building a boat

themselves. John and Henry’s hearts are in their work. At the end of

one week the masterpiece is finished. It is a dory, heavy and strongly

built, with a sharp bow, such as fishermen use; it is fifteen feet

long by three and a half in breadth at the middle. A real craft: you

can move about in it, sail it, stow away a little cargo in it. A good

coat of paint will protect it and give it a tidier appearance. As it

is destined to take part in open-air holidays on the water, it must be

painted green with a blue border. The painting is done in a jiffy, and

then comes the glorious moment when with a final glance the creators

survey their creation, weaned at last from themselves and ready to face

the broad daylight of the world.... For legs the dory has wheels that

will enable it to be rolled around falls.

Nothing remains now but to equip it. It must have two sets of oars,

poles, two masts; you must foresee everything when you have these vast

projects in your head. As the boat is going to carry you a long way and

you are going to camp out under the stars, the tent is indispensable.

Then there is no limit to your dreams. With a boat and a tent you can

sail round a continent, coast along all the shores, disembark on an

island, set up your tent there, light a fire and survey the landscape

with that knowing air: It’s I, exactly. Do you recognize me?... Yes,

you can do unbelievable things with this boat. You can begin to enjoy

the world, measure the amplitude of the earth. You can carry Concord

with you to all sorts of strange countries, scour the land, found

colonies.

Meanwhile, you begin experimenting with it, you lose no time, you are

prouder of being a good mariner than a good schoolmaster and you invite

the boys on board to teach them things that are not to be found in

the books. New aspects of the world are revealed, you make important

discoveries, for you are the man who has a boat.

To think there were so many unknown things around you: brooks,

mountains, buildings, men, flocks of ducks, and all the people on the

banks--unsuspected neighbours! If it were not for the school, you

would like to follow the watery road as far as ever it could lead you.

Concord widens into a vast province, as if newly peopled with animals

and landscapes and surprises. In the succession of the springs and the

summers, this spring of the year 1839 will always bear for you the

colours of the boat--green and blue, will bear a sail swelling against

a mast, which two brothers have planed with their own hands in an

open-air dock-yard.

When you really know your boat you are ready for the decisive

adventures for which it has been fitted out. The long vacation has

come. Your departure is fixed for Saturday, the last day of August.

This is to be no mere airing before supper: it is the great embarkation

for a week or two weeks, for good and all--who knows?--for the fabulous

regions where men speak another language.

John and Henry have made plans to go all the way to the White Mountains

by water, from little Concord, their village, to big Concord, the

capital of New Hampshire. It is a plan that requires some reflexion.

They have thought it over and made up their minds, and they are to

set out to-morrow. Preparations, the cargo. First the tent and a

buffalo-skin; then a few tools, some utensils for their cooking; as

provisions in reserve some potatoes and melons from their own patch.

Do not laugh, you sceptics. You don’t know what it is to have at hand,

under all circumstances, a fruit whose virtues are perfectly known

to you. And isn’t it like having on board a friendly presence, a

remembrance of the garden, that will bring the pilgrims good luck on

their perilous voyage? Like the boat itself, the melons are the fruit

of their own labour, and thus, without borrowing anything from anyone,

they set forth, side by side, for the conquest of the world.

At last, the thrilling moment. Vain for you your Harvard diploma,

vain your teaching of Greek and Latin this August afternoon, when you

finally jump into the boat that awaits you, all provisioned, and gently

gives under your feet. What are your learning and your evening dreams

beside the certitude that floods you with happiness like a child,

beside the glamour of this dazzling day and this running water that

is going to carry you to the beyond?... Books? The most beautiful of

them all is a thousand times less beautiful to you than that which this

rude dory under your oars and your sail is eager to bring you. Wisdom?

Listen to that rippling along the bank; the river whispers to you as it

passes that she herself is wisdom--and how your soul responds to the

invitation of the voyage!

It has rained in the morning, as if the gods of the Concord had wished

to thwart the plans of two good boys who are setting out in search of

them; but this only makes the smile of the afternoon more calm. Come

along, off we go! Good-bye, friends. A cup of air to your health! A

little further on, as a final farewell from the navigators, a salvo of

joy which the forest echoes after noting it on its leaves. The sounds

of the village are stilled, you sink into a deep dream, rhythmical

with the gliding of the oars. You slip along this road that runs,

buoyant, fresh, through the recesses of the landscape. You surprise it,

as it were, gently, in its privacy, not seizing it by the throat as you

do on those beastly, dusty roads where the world leaves its dung and

the imprint of its iron feet. The watery way flows on and carries you

past the willows, the waterplants with their white and rose-coloured

flowers, the meadow grass with the faded tints of the closing summer.

A bittern sails away, a tortoise drops into the water. From afar the

familiar heights salute you courteously. Farewell, village, farewell,

last fisherman with your motionless line and your dog.

We are rowing towards fresh promises: see how the river widens out.

We pull straight ahead, in cadence, not like apprentices. The evening

draws in; it makes good rowing, and what good haying it ought to be at

this hour for those reapers over there, almost lost in the grass of the

meadows, where every blade they cut seems to exhale a sigh of gladness

and commit it to the breeze, the courier of the evening. It is time to

look for a good place for the night. We are seven miles from Concord.

Billerica already.... It is astonishing what this name stands for when

you have been rowing for hours and are ready to pitch your tent on

_terra firma!_ And here are some ripe huckleberries for dessert The

fire crackles. A good cup of cocoa, some bread. And sunset to finish

the meal. Before you, as far as the horizon, nothing but a solitary

farmhouse, far away, lost in the glorious wilderness, amid the clumps

of pines, the hills, the rocks, all the squatting people of the brush.

Fireflies in the grass. The good night awaits the two of you under the

cotton tent that is fastened to one of the masts. But the hour is so

captivating, this August evening is so charged with messages in the

depths of the silence, that you have no desire to go to sleep at once.

Neighbours betray their presence. A fox makes his rounds; some creature

fumbles among the potatoes and melons in the boat, disappearing into

the water when you go to see what it is. On the horizon a great blaze

from a fire over in Lowell; the fire-alarm reaches you in snatches,

mingled with the barking of the watch-dogs from invisible farms. Two

lads who have rowed with a will roll themselves up in the buffalo-skin

and close their eyes on the thought of the boat moored by the clump of

alders for the next day. Good night, brother. Good night, Henry. How

about the school?... And the eight, ten, twelve, fifteen days like this

one to look forward to? Blow out the lantern.

Sunday morning. You come out of your tent into the mist of the dawn and

light the fire for breakfast. Then, like the pagan you are, oblivious

of the fall of man, fold up the tent and embark with your Sunday soul

in the rising sun that disperses the fog. You give names to the spots

along the way, the hills, cliffs, woods, as fresh as if no human eye

had ever touched them. The river is a mirror: it is Sunday on the

water, too, and you hesitate to disturb it with a stroke of your oar.

A skiff passes with two men, gliding so lightly that it seems almost

unreal among the reflexions of the foliage in the water. The meditation

of the frogs, motionless on the reeds, contemplating the day of the

Lord’s rest, is tinged with the grave Sabbath beauty.

Just above the Billerica Falls they take the canal through the woods,

and one of the two mariners pulls the dory with the rope along the

tow-path as far as the dam. The people are coming out of church in

the village and the good folk look down from the height of the bridge

upon these two good-for-nothings who are voyaging along, just as if

the Lord’s day were not made to cement the nothingness of the week

that has passed with the nothingness of that which is dawning. But the

lock-keeper is more liberal-minded: he knows two merry souls, out for

adventure, when he sees them, and he opens the locks for them, in spite

of the Sunday rule. The lock-keepers of this world are broad enough to

redeem its narrowness.

And now they find themselves on the Merrimac, the great river. The dory

is a mere insect striking out on this sheet of water, one hundred,

two, four hundred yards wide, over which every sound glances and

comes to you with a marvellous clearness. Those children repeating

their catechism in a cottage are a good third of a mile away from you

who catch the murmur of their voices; or is it that the words of the

catechism have a miraculous carrying-power? The cows in the meadow do

not know their catechism; they are content to be beautiful in silence

and enrich the look of those villages with their tiny harbours and

their fairylike setting. The boat has burst into a new part of the

world; this is the valley that leads up into the heart of New Hampshire

by a succession of natural dams, with a rapid, leaping current of

yellowish water cut by falls. When you have rowed since morning

against the current, your nooning is very precious in the shade of

an apple-tree. It is Chelmsford here, the village where your parents

came once to seek their fortune. The hour is so beautiful under this

apple-tree that you would like to read a poem as ample as the landscape

of the valley; when Sunday chimes within you and as far as the horizon,

you would like all this music to be crowned in that of a poem.

See those islets. High up on one of them are perched two men who hail

the little craft, asking to be taken off. But there are the melons, the

tent, a whole outfit on board, and with this cargo the dory already

has enough trouble making headway against the stream. Can’t be done,

boys; you will have to make _terra firma_ and Nashua on foot. Good

luck! Further on, what is this enormous fish whose back rises and sinks

in mid-stream? A sturgeon? A monster? Look out there: with a blow of

that assuredly formidable tail it could send to the bottom two brothers

and their fortune. But no, this old fraud that is going to capsize us

is nothing but a wooden spar fixed there as a buoy to warn sailors of

sunken rocks....

The sun sets, twilight creeps in; shall we think of resting, like the

fish who, save for a few that prowl all night, are preparing themselves

for sleep? You have stretched out the most beautiful of Sundays as long

as you could between the two shores and rowing hard against this strong

current. You have well earned the favourable spot for pitching your

tent and tasting the sleep of adventurers.

The earth is firm and sweet under your feet when you trample it after a

whole day tossing about in a walnut-shell. You unload the provisions,

like conquistadors who have reached a far country after countless

perils, arrived at a shore where you will make yourself understood by

signs to the natives, if any appear. Once the lantern is hung to the

tent-pole, the fire ready, the kettle on the fire, you are at home;

nothing is missing to make life solid and satisfying. After closing

the tent, Henry scribbles a few notes in the glimmering light of the

lantern: the shore journal of the navigators. And after a little chat

they go to sleep in the buffalo-skin. On the opposite bank, some

Irish labourers on the railroad are celebrating the Sabbath with wild

shouts, whirling up and down the track. But their brawling is not loud

enough to disturb the sleep of the two oarsmen who soon forget where

they are. The two lads are dead to the world among all the sleeping

creatures who, like them, have drained the happiness of Sunday on the

banks. Alone, the river, eager to reach its end, pursues all night its

course to the sea; its adventure will brook no delay.

But why does this evil beast traverse in a dream the sleep of a happy

man, torturing him after a blissful day?... Happily, in the same

buffalo-skin sleeps his good genius, with a sleep that is peaceful and

unbroken all night long. The phantoms of agonizing dreams are dispersed

by the brotherly voice sounding under the tent in the early day. And

listen now to this little world of oak-leaves, under which you have

slept, saying their morning prayers in the breeze.

It is enough to hear the rippling of the river, when you emerge from

your tent, and to see once more the boat that is calmly waiting for

you, to feel a hunger for adventure. So off you start again through the

fog to devour the beautiful week that lies before you, round and new;

you have not yet broken the loaf, you have merely nibbled a few crumbs;

the country you have passed is only a tiny morsel of the territories

you plan to annex.

Occasionally, when you have watched the banks gliding by for a long

time, the desire seizes you to draw nearer and explore a little the

hinterland of the country you are skirting. Nothing easier for you who

are at once the commanding officer, the crew and the passengers. One

of the two coxswains runs along the shore, while the other continues

to row and a little further on picks up the explorer and hears him

recount his discoveries. There have been surprises. By good luck the

rover has happened into a cottage, and because he looks well and it

is a summer morning when hearts are softened with generosity, the

farmer’s wife has offered him a bowl of milk which he has tossed off,

while the children have watched the stranger amorously plunging his

big nozzle into the little bowl. During this excursion the other one

on board, if he is thirsty, halves a melon and dispatches it, drawing

up under the bows on the bank, where he waits for the explorer. In the

heat of the day, a New England lad whose muscles are hard enough to

manage the oars feels himself invaded by an Oriental indolence, with

a great pity for the vague humanity toiling and moiling down there in

the world. Amid the delights of the siesta, with a succulent slice of

melon in a boat in the shadow of a willow, he can find some apology for

pleasure-lovers, even for smokers of opium.

The river seems to flow solely for the joy of these two comrades who

have set out one fine Saturday for the conquest of the world. Just this

side of Nashua a fleet of great canal-boats appears, with sails set and

high bulwarks, like junks. Have you really been asleep on the stream

and actually reached the Orient? Let’s make the most of it. The rowers

will enjoy a little idling. From the dory they throw a rope and get

themselves towed a bit of the way like pashas; it has grown so hot that

two schoolmasters, who are not of the soft kind, can allow themselves

to be towed by a great merchantman. They toss into the water some of

the melons that remain on board; they have seen enough of them, and

the fish may like them. These jovial boatmen with whom they chat do

not break the beautiful harmony of the landscape; they belong in it,

and their language has the flavour of the river-grass. When they have

passed and you find yourselves alone again in your dory, oars in hand,

the solitude has almost a new taste.

Noon suggests a swim and a siesta under a tree. Suddenly a boatman’s

horn, echoing from bank to bank, rouses the sleepers, and they set out

again. The linden trees on the shore are a revelation. Nashua drops

behind, the bridge, the junction of the rivers, the mills; they are

in the woods again, and the evening clouds are reflected in the water

like a warning. This evening the gods have planned for the encampment a

beautiful, solitary spot on the border of a pine-wood, under the rocky

walls of a deep ravine. The gods that voyage along these shores know

how soft is the carpet the pine-needles make and what a fragrance they

will add to the fire and the smoke. The song of the kettle, like an

incantation, calls up this evening the friends they have left in the

village; their images prowl and linger about the tent, bending over the

shoulders of these two companions on the edge of the forest who are

trying to discover on the map in the centre of what universe they are

this evening and what country they will annex to-morrow. If you are

awakened to-night by the shrill grating of a cricket, or the rambling

of a spider over the peaks and passes of your face, the brook that

flows at the bottom of the ravine has a cradle-song that will lull you

to sleep again. Later, through a restless night at home, you will think

of the quality of this sleep close to the earth after a day on the

water.

Far away in the night someone is beating a drum--some tyro preparing

for a country muster--and this trivial rat-a-tat-tat, ennobled by the

distance and the darkness, seems, in the warmth of heroism that pours

through the buffalo-skin, strangely to arm you for the most extravagant

deeds. What will the coming dawn suggest, the Deliverance of the Holy

Sepulchre or the Quest of the Golden Fleece? And has this high wind

that shakes the tent a mission to inform the sleepers and publish the

great news along the banks and under the pines? In any case, you are

awake before dawn to be ready to welcome the great day, whatever it

may be. Hand me the hatchet, I am off for fuel. The birds are still on

their roosts and the kettle is already singing like a nurse. They haul

the boat up on land, upset it and empty it and give it a good rinsing.

At three o’clock everything is reshipped, stowed away, ready for

departure, with the tent spread over the bow, for it is drenched with

dew. The heavy morning fog, the curtain that had fallen to conceal the

surprises to come, promises a glorious day.

As the banks are cleared of their velvety coverlet, sparkling with dew

under the first rays, and the pines on the shore reveal their outlines,

the river appears as large as an arm of the sea. The day of glory

announced by the drum rises between the high slopes of the river: not a

village in sight; you might think you were in the days of the Redskins,

in the midst of a primitive country. You row with a will. Drummer of

the night, the meaning of your rat-a-tat-tat becomes clear. We are

going to review landscapes and men.

First, at Cromwell’s Falls, the lock-keeper, with whom the boys

exchange some wholesome gossip. Several canal-boats are waiting to

pass. On such a morning, if you encountered humanity in the form of

some fellow with affected manners, a crabbed face and the look of a

deacon, you would bless anyone who would force his respectable head

under the water. But as for these shapely, strapping boatmen, in their

shirt-sleeves, bare-headed, slouching or leaning on a pole, they have a

sort of accent that heightens the meaning of the proud word on your own

lips, fellow-creature. See that flaxen-haired brother there, with his

skin tanned by wind and sun, young or old, you could never say which,

but rugged and beautiful as a tree. Don’t put yourself out to be

polite; it doesn’t go with these fellows. A few words of the language

of men and everything is understood. The banter you shout back to them

as you pull away is as cordial as a farewell. With all the boatmen you

meet you exchange a friendly greeting.

Happy souls.... To be the two men on board these canal-boats, pushing

with the pole when you are going up the stream, steering with the aid

of an oar at each end when you are in mid-stream, hoisting the sail if

the wind is favourable, transporting wood or bricks and bringing back

odd freight: what could be jollier on a rustling September morning like

this on the water? You contrive a little shelter under the cargo, where

you may retire from the rain. As you sail your boat along in this way

you do not seem to be toiling for wages or an employer; it is as if you

were playing some very ancient game. The day’s work ended, you get your

supper and lodging at some house or other by the water-side, breakfast

in the morning with the lock-man, load your boat, travel all day,

unload, receive your pay, take a drink at the inn, where you hear the

news of the world, and then off again. A fine life, blooming with songs

that sound over the river.

These were the people the marvelling eyes of a child had seen now and

then, when a canal-boat passed the village. Their fabulous race, as he

has come to know it better, has lost none of its glamour in the eyes of

the man. Sometimes when the high road approaches within a few hundred

yards of the shore, what a sorry, absurd figure the parti-coloured

stage cuts beside these barges, as it sweeps past in a cloud of dust!

Good luck to you, my fine fellows, who are in such a hurry to get

there, piled in together, busy, with your worries and your trunks

heaped up on the rack behind.... No doubt you are making good time,

but you have not the least notion of the sights we are passing, that

cottage bathed in a patriarchal atmosphere, with the well and the

barn, and the old grandfather sitting on a bench; and those shagbark

trees, unlike anything to be seen in Concord or where you live, in all

probability, and those magnificent maples. See that scow there turned

up on the bank, which those carpenter boys are mending. The joyous ring

of the great strokes of their hammers, echoing from shore to shore, and

the glittering of their tools in the sun, are not for townspeople who

take the stage. These things that make work as beautiful as a festival,

the work that nourishes the soul and the muscles of a man ... repairing

a boat, building a hayrick, woodcutting in the forest, setting up the

frame of a house under the benediction of the open air ... what have

they in common with your infernal routine, you passengers of the stage?

The burning sun plumbs the landscape. That large island with the shade

and the cattle, at the mouth of a river, is too inviting to be ignored.

They put into port, and as the flesh is weak they no longer resist the

temptation of those pigeons that have also stopped there, during the

heat of the day, and are innocently cooing among the branches, heedless

of the two savages that approach with their engines of death. One of

the pigeons has fallen. You savages, wash in the river the hands that

have killed in cold blood one of these beautiful pigeons that had also

set out on a journey; do penance, eaters of innocent flesh, who have

already brought down some squirrels for your supper, and now, in sheer

wantonness, replace them with a pigeon: boil a bowl of rice. After the

feast, recite some poetry, since you have no music, and yield in your

satiety to idleness in the shade of this island where you have been

behaving like abject creatures of civilisation.

But it is time to re-embark. They raise the sail to take advantage of

the breeze. From the top of a hill forming the bank, some lumberers

are rolling down timber that falls into the water with a thundering

roar; their axes and levers glitter in the sun. That cottage, with

its dooryard blossoming with sunflowers and poppies, smiles with such

confidence that they skirt the bank to see it better. This is a wild

region that makes them want to explore it a little. Those old oaks

welcome them as friends who do not often receive visits. A lonely horse

in a pasture, then some cows grazing in the shade, after the warm day,

and some wild apple trees with the sourish fruit that Henry knows

so well and likes. That ruined mill shrouded in creepers, which the

pedestrian discovers while following a torrent through the woods, sets

him thinking when he regains the boat of the life and the dreams of the

old settler who lived there once and the taste that his flour must have

had.

At Coos Falls, in a solitary part of the river, some stone-masons are

repairing the locks. They stop for a chat. One of them, a young man,

questions the voyagers about their adventures, examines the little

craft and its outfit with a confession in his eye. If he only could

set off with these two fellows to explore the world! What a trio they

would make, a mason and two schoolmasters, who are not more than

twenty-five.... A wild desire seizes him to throw away the chisel

and mallet, leap into the boat and say to them: “Take me! I have had

enough of stone-cutting. Now I want to cut into the stuff of the vast

world....” But the stones remain, little mason, weights heavier than

your vision, which soon disappears with the two explorers, leaving you

pensive at your work.

As they continue to ascend, the watery landscape becomes more rugged,

interspersed with rapids, rocks, falls. On the fifth day they are

between Manchester and Bedford. There are many locks to pass through,

and sometimes no lock-keeper is at hand. Then they have the fun of

manipulating the lock themselves, no easy task but so amusing.... They

are at once the passengers and the all-powerful being who locks the

boat through.

Contemplating the cottages of these lock-keepers, gloriously lost

before a vast stretch of whirling waters, roaring, foaming, you are

filled with envy at the thought of the good soul who lives his life

there as a lock-man, almost as solitary as a lighthouse-keeper, and

the desire seizes you to go in, just to ask for a glass of water and

hear the sound of a human voice as a contrast to that of the river.

This one seems to be asleep on the earth under the benediction of the

summer sun, like an infant in the warmth of its mother’s breast. Henry

crosses the little garden and knocks at the door. A woman opens it:

he can’t have such a shaggy face, after all, in spite of five nomadic

days, or she would not invite him in so prettily. The freshly scoured

floor has a fragrant odour; the visitor is afraid of soiling it with

his big boots. He takes a glass from the dresser, then goes to the well

where he catches a glimpse of his hairy face, the face of a voyager who

has not had the leisure to shave himself like a true Christian. The

lockman’s wife offers him a little molasses and ginger to temper this

hard water, for the day is warm. Nearby her brother, the sailor, who

seems a little out of his element among these freshwater folk, dandles

the family cat; with his sea-dog’s eye, filled with the horizon,

he scrutinizes the visitor curiously, sympathetically. Oh, these

lockmen’s cottages, with their fireplaces and their door-yards, in

this solitude!... What honey one could make here, a wild and exquisite

honey, with that lingering suggestion of bitterness in the taste which

is so grateful to healthy palates.

The oarsman is a happy man who turns his back on his discoveries, lets

them come, and only enjoys them after they have well passed. This

wooded island is the largest they have encountered thus far. It seems

to say: I have been here since the beginning of things, waiting for the

day when you would plant your tent-pole for the night in the shelter

of my great elms. Who knows but I shall yield myself to you with such

trust that you may decide to conclude your adventure and set up your

hearthstone here? Between the world and myself there is nothing but

a strip of water: would not that protect you from it and connect you

with it sufficiently?... But as it is still morning, they leave behind

them the great island and the great dream, to resume the course of the

big wonders that are offered two poor devils who scan the world from a

little boat of their own making.

After Amoskeag Falls, as steep as a staircase where they are in danger

of capsizing every minute and have to jump into the water to right the

boat, the river opens out into a lake. They make fast under a grove

of alders for their lunch and siesta. A good breeze blows up. Boats

pass, with their sails set, great, heavy, one-winged birds advancing

with a stately solemnity. The boats pass which they saw before lunch

and the last of which offered to take the two navigators and their

traps on board and carry them the rest of the way; when the brothers

are resting in the shade, the wag at the helm calls out a proposal to

take them in tow. Many thanks, my boy, not just now; it is too good

under these trees. When lunch is finished, John and Henry also raise

their sail and, rowing vigorously, catch up with the big canal-boat

which has hardly advanced at all, the breeze having fallen. Now then,

my barge-boy, would you like us to take you in tow? Here’s a piece of

rope if we can oblige you. The little dory you laughed at a while ago

has the laugh on you. And one by one the oarsmen overtake the other

monsters that are painfully dragging their bellies in a file along the

watery road.

They have become once more the sovereigns of the river; but this does

not make it less necessary for them to look for provisions before

night. Their stock is low. John jumps ashore and sets off to find a

farmhouse where they can revictual, while Henry explores the other bank

for a suitable haven for the night. Again the canal-boats loom behind

them, advancing with much effort, for the breeze has quite died away.

John comes back with a loaf of bread and some melons, accompanied by

a little flaxen-haired boy who wants to have a close view of the boat

of these people who have set out for adventure on the water and have

brought nothing to eat. He too, like the little mason, would love to

go with them; who would not love to go with John? They would be happy

to take him on board, this lively boy with the sparkling blue eyes,

who would not weigh very much among the cargo; but his father will not

allow it. But he is a very good-natured father, just the same, and

he invites the travellers to come and visit his farm the next day.

With pleasure. Are they not colleagues? Who knows more about raising

melons than they? They might even be able to recommend some seeds. They

taste his products, one of which, set in the water to cool while they

are pitching the tent, has taken it into its head to go off with the

current, like a melon on vacation that has been seized with a desire

for the sea; they have to jump into the boat to capture it, for it is

already far away. They taste his melons, sitting on the bank, facing

the glow of the sunset in which the river wishes to share, to light its

depths on its evening journey. The song over there, close by, is that

of the brook at the mouth of which they have pitched their camp, and

which hastens to confide to the great confused current a few secrets it

has brought from afar.

That night Henry’s dreams under the tent file past amid the babble of

this neighbour and disappear as he awakens at the soft tapping of drops

of rain on the cotton roof. A sparrow trills cheerily in the morning:

a good omen. They set out with this promise. More locks. And then

the last one: nothing beyond but impassable rapids. A pity, for the

navigators, who have set out from Concord, Massachusetts, want to push

on by boat to Concord, New Hampshire. It would be more of an adventure

but it can’t be done. Since their goal is the White Mountains, they

will leave the boat here and continue along the shore on foot. Before

they became great navigators, they had been great walkers.

So they cut a pair of sticks and set out like pilgrims in the mist and

rain. If they are to have no more the joy of the river and the boat,

they will have the pleasure of the hard earth under the freedom of

their big boots. The earth and the watery meadows have a sweet smell.

All the frogs in Christendom are sounding the hymn of deliverance and

the toadstools smile with joy in the starch of their little collars.

The travellers resolutely drench themselves. Are you afraid of a little

wetting? Then stay shut up at home; stay where it’s dry, dry souls. You

are not cut out for sitting in the rain, on the side of a brush-covered

hill, happy even if your clothes are soaking. Perhaps it will clear in

the afternoon; but what if it doesn’t clear?

A good welcome to big Concord. To save time they take the stage (yes,

like those other idiots) as far as Plymouth, where a friend lives

with whom they want to shake hands; then they resume the staff and

the road. They come to a little sylvan inn where, in the evening, the

people of the neighbourhood gather to discuss their business and hear

the news over a glass of whisky. They wonder where in the world these

people have come from when all day they have not caught even a glimpse

of a roof. On the inn-table lies an old newspaper. At home Henry has

little use for this kind of literature; he leaves the paper to his

father who enjoys it so much. But in this poor, solitary inn, when

you have tramped all day through the woods, it is astonishing what

savour an old newspaper that gives you the stale news of the world

acquires, a newspaper that has been rumpled by all sorts of rough

hands, astonishing how your eyes fasten on a paragraph and you are led

to believe in the virtues of the soap recommended in the advertisements.

And then, in this lost country, you have surprising encounters. Along a

path in the woods a young soldier advances in full regimentals, going

to muster no doubt with his musket on his shoulder; he marches with

military step, with an air of being very sure of the importance of his

mission. He must carry himself well, you see, before these civilians,

and safeguard in the depths of the forest the prestige of his military

apparel. Poor little soul! As he passes close to John and Henry his

martial mask falls, he becomes a little boy again in his absurd harness

in the presence of these trees that are judging him, and, crestfallen

under his warrior helmet, he steals away unheroically, embarrassed by

the greaves that chafe his legs. Honest little lad, we wish you well!

They can send you off and dress and drill you in the barracks or get

you killed for no reason at all. Your ingenuousness consents to it all

in advance.

As they leave Sanbornton the mountains appear. They spend several days

exploring them. It is a great revelation. The culminating point of the

journey is at an altitude of 6288 feet, that of Mount Washington, which

the two comrades climb. On the twelfth day they are back again at the

place where they left their boat. Everything is in good condition, and

the tent, the blankets, left in charge of the melon-grower, are quite

dry. This lovable man expects his friends to carry off an immense melon

to ballast the little boat: see, this one, which he long ago gave his

flaxen-headed heir permission to dispose of as he chose. John carries

it off, to the satisfaction of the owner, for he is the friend to whom

you give whatever is dearest to you.

They are not homesick in the least, but they must return southwards to

their own anchorage. The return is beautiful too. They set off spinning

like an arrow, with the current, as far as the confluence of the

Concord. The departure is at noon, this very Thursday. The river smiles

under the fresh mid-September wind; they raise the sail, they can

rest on their oars occasionally without loss of time. And everything

drifts past them again, in the other direction. As they see the funny

little dory repassing with its two savages on board, the people

recognize them and give them a friendly halloo. To watch the sail, the

lumbermen, rolling their timber down with an immense splash into the

water, pause for a moment. From their boat the two adventurers salute

every nook of the landscape, banks, islands, mouths of rivers, like

old acquaintances. They must set up their tent once more, at least: it

shall be opposite the large island of the slaughtered pigeons where

they took their siesta on the way up. The boat is drawn up on the

sand. Not a sail in sight; nothing but the spiders of the grassy jungle

which come out curiously at the light of the lantern, and explore the

mystery of the buffalo-skin spread out on the ground.

It is fragrant this evening, and every blade of grass, damp with dew,

seems to be on its doorstep taking the air. They have journeyed far

to-day and are tired; and after dipping their slices of bread in a cup

of cocoa and scribbling the main things down in their journals, they

blow out the lantern and bid farewell to Thursday. A high wind in the

night flaps the curtains of the tent. In the morning, the heavy fog

rolls away over the water, uncovering a landscape suddenly tinged with

autumn. In the flitting clouds, in the look of the cottages, in the

lowing of the cattle in the meadows, in the flying troops of flickers,

the death of summer is confirmed. And when they set foot on earth and

clamber up the bank to cast an eye over the countryside, they catch

almost everywhere the prevailing yellow note of the asters, coreopses,

tansies, golden-rod, little flowers of autumn already burning with the

flames of the declining summer’s sun--the little candles left lighted

all day long for the pilgrims in the church of the meadows.

But they carry on at a good pace, with sail stretched, one steering

with an oar in the stern, the other rowing. The boat, seized by the

autumnal ferment, speeds along; in the rippling of the water before

them they seem to hear it laughing to itself at the promise of the

splendour the season is preparing to bring forth. They are invigorated

by this brisk wind that obliges them to sit muffled in their cloaks.

See how they bound along; they are almost home again already. Here

is the beginning of Massachusetts. They pass--rare spectacle--a

pleasure-boat with a young man and a girl, and a dory, a commoner

sight, with some people who are gathering driftwood for the winter.

As they sail, they munch an apple-pie they have bought at a farm; it

is rather tart. Driven by this famous breeze that bends the trees

on the bank, they scud merrily along, with a devil-may-care look in

their faces, at a speed that astonishes the men on some scows which

they pass. Already the locks of the canal through the woods that gives

access to the Concord. Yes, here we are, dear old Musketaquid! We shall

have to row hard, against the current, and try to arrive this evening.

The sun reappears to make Chelmsford and Billerica smile, and sinks

magnificently, filling the valley with a flood of soft light. High

overhead, in silence, two herons pass against the sky, on their way

to the North. A good journey, comrades up there; our home is to the

Southwest. If you feel as we do, at this heavenly hour of the end of

day when two lads, returning from a long expedition, are filled by

the beauty of the familiar landscape, you are two very high-hearted

herons. The night falls, they row in the light of the few candles a

kind providence has set burning above, far higher than the track of the

herons. There is no sound on board but the monotonous cadence of the

oars, for John and Henry have no desire to talk; silence alone can draw

out the thoughts that fill them. They mean to arrive to-night, Friday

the thirteenth.

And indeed, late in the evening, the boat of the two argonauts draws

up very smoothly alongside the shore whence it had set out fourteen

days before, and rubs its wet cheek against the bearded bank. They have

completed a stage of fifty miles this day.

John and Henry leap ashore, draw up the boat and fasten it to the wild

apple tree. And then! A last look at the dory that has borne them so

far out into the wide world, and laden with their traps they turn their

steps towards the house. For them now the sweetness of civilised

life and soft beds. They are ready to face them with visages bronzed

by the wind and the sun of the river. But to-morrow morning, when

they awaken, how surprising it will be not to hear the flick-flack of

the cotton tent over their heads, to smell no longer the warm odour

of the buffalo-skin! What a surprise and what a disenchantment to

find the four walls, a motionless ceiling, the glass window.... How

sad. Meanwhile, a ramble in the woods to-morrow, just to see what

preparations are on foot there for the festival of autumn.

* * * * *

The school will soon have lasted for three years. In spite of all, the

masters have inspired confidence, and there are now twenty-five pupils.

There would be more of them if the building were not inadequate. For

others are awaiting the first vacancy, to be taught in their turn. And

those pious personages may well ask whether the good morals of the rod

are not in peril.

Then, towards Easter, they hear that the Thoreau school is going to

close. What has happened? John feels shaky, unable to continue. For

some time he has not been well, but he has said nothing about it, in

order not to discourage the pupils in their work. But now he is no

longer able to keep up the pretence. Whatever the regrets and the

consequences may be, everything must be given up abruptly, on the high

tide of success, so that John may take care of himself, for it is

he who steers the ship. Henry, who had begun the school without his

brother, would no longer have the same reasons for keeping it if the

latter retired. To keep school with John was perfect. Without him, it

was not to be thought of. Better to look for something else.

John is ill, consumed by a slow, tenacious disease.... Is the

grandfather, lying down there in the graveyard, demanding him back?

Already three of his daughters--Aunts Sarah, Nancy and Mary, and one

of his sons, Uncle David, whose Christian name Henry bears, have died

young of consumption, like their father. Is his grandson going to have

the same fate? Or is John to be confronted with a demand more brutal

still? To be condemned without appeal, because sweet souls like him

are out of place on this earth? Yes, for the poor fellow, as he drags

along, is finally carried off, with a refinement of horror. In shaving

himself he makes an insignificant cut. Lockjaw sets in; and the smile

of this loving soul is extinguished amid atrocious convulsions. John

dies in torture.

In the house of mourning, on this February day of 1842, the younger

brother is the most miserable of all. What is the use of fortitude,

of this mask of impassibility, when you are stricken in the tenderest

depths? How survive the best part of yourself? A boy, crushed under his

suffering, does not know.... John, my brother, after these years we

have enjoyed together, and all the secrets we have shared, how can I

support alone the weight of this grief that once was joy? My comrade,

my inspiration, my good genius, my brother. You whom one read as a

beautiful story that everyone loves to hear retold. You never had to be

deciphered laboriously to yield the meaning of the tale....

Henry remains sitting in the house, with this weight that overwhelms

him. He no longer cares for anything: everything, in the garden, in the

woods, on the banks of the river, in the neighbourhood of their school,

cries out his destitution. His sisters try to take him out to distract

him. He does not object, he is inert. He is indifferent to everything.

It is as if he had lost the highest reason for existence, love.

Will he regain his poise, his taste for life? Possibly--apparently.

But there is in his deepest depths an incurable wound that will never

endure being touched, however lightly. He cannot make the slightest

verbal allusion to his bereavement, so greatly does it pain him. To

deceive himself he plays the stoic, writing to a friend that a musical

air has brought back to him the sense of the harmony of the universe

and that he wishes never again to see his brother in life--that he

wishes only for his ideal prototype. But in the confidences of his

Journal how much truer he is! “Where is my heart gone? They say men

cannot part with it and live.” That delightful intimacy they had

shared through childhood, boyhood, manhood, he knew very well he would

never find again, _never_. John’s grave enclosed the youth of two.

Twelve years later, trying to describe to a friend those moments when

his brother had disappeared in torture, Henry turned pale and almost

fainted.

There remained the boat they had built, with which they had unrolled

the beautiful watered ribbon of their adventures. To see it rocking

against the bank was simply to have before him a sharper image of his

grief: John taking sail to face alone a terrible adventure. He would go

no more in this boat. That was ended.

In the following spring he gave it to a friend who wanted it.