_Henry Happy Heathen._ It would be a curious design on the bark and
would recall those mysterious signs which the Indians engraved to mark
their passing. Or Three Hatchets, to puzzle passers-by still more. And
then dance a wild jig around the tree at the thought of the beautiful
epitaph there, to be cut off some day and set on a flat stone among the
crosses and urns in a graveyard.
He is happy without reason, because things are as they are ... happy
just as the river is happy as it hastens to join its great sister
and run with her down to the sea ... or as the leaves of the poplar,
fluttering as they prattle the news which this gay little wind has
whispered to them as it passed. In the delight that he shares with all
these things he strews the landscape with imaginary beings after his
own heart. There are whole families of them of whom he has never caught
so much as a glimpse, but who, as he knows, live there in the spots
where his dreams place them. From afar he greets them as he passes,
sure friends who must not be disturbed at their work or in their
serenity; it is enough to know that they are there. Their presence
helps him to endure cheerfully the misery of the town.
With his own happiness chinking down in his pockets like an arrow-head
against the steel of his knife, Henry marvels that he never encounters
anyone on his expeditions. So he is the only one to profit by all this?
Not one of his own kind dreams of disputing his pleasure with him. I
am greatly obliged to you all. How kind of you to abandon the earth
to me, while you, sober souls, measure cotton behind your counters
or spend the whole afternoon sitting with your legs crossed on your
bench like a penitent! Take care or some green sprig may thrust itself
between the pages of your existence; this would spoil the pious images
that slip into your book. Work on, and let me carry off in peace what
you despise. You will not prevent a lad who is up earlier than you
and passes your yard in the moonlight without waking you from drawing
from your land the profits he is pleased to put into his own pocket.
Let each have his own share: you bear the costs and the risks and take
the money, and he in his poverty will collect the tithe. The hail that
ravages your harvest will be music in his ears. You will never believe
it; but unaware of it as you may be, it is for him that all your work
is done, good people. You think you are the possessors, but it is he
who possesses you.
Henry exercises with impudent freedom the privileges that are common to
all men. He has not surrendered for the ownership of a miserable field
or two his claims to the whole earth. Henry knows his rights. He will
build a fence for you now and then at so much a yard, but you cannot
talk to him about Holy Property.
Henry is the largest farmer in Concord. He collects the revenues of
a whole township. There are other men in this world who, through
carelessness or lack of skill, utterly fail to perceive what belongs to
them by right. They are the indifferent souls who forget to take their
share of the spectacle of the setting sun, the beauty of men and women,
the sea, the day, the night, the trees, the lands of their neighbours.
Well, it is for them that the little god with the big boots, the great
nose, the thin chest, the long arms and the sloping shoulders collects
the inalienable share of the common property.
Suppose, some day, the village authorities, perceiving the value for
everyone of these journeys of a little god who so carefully keeps up
the forest paths and maintains the right of way wherever men might
like to go, were to coax him into accepting an appointment, as, let us
say, Conservator of Waste Lands or Inspector of Swamps or Curator of
Indian Relics? Something like a liaison officer between the wilderness
and civilization. Of course they would have to be tactful and appoint
him without any formal appointment. For in what form could they make
him accept the frightful idea of being any kind of town official!
With a little imagination they might be able to find the formula that
would permit him to remain his own free self and yet receive a small
allowance just the same. Perhaps a little fund, or a commission, as
in the case of an explorer.... Yes, assuming that you could find
in the bosom of the town-council the slightest sense of these fine
shades. Hm ... let’s not be too sanguine about it. But what a fine
thing it would be for the town to be assured for some trifling sum of
the services of a young man who has an eye for these treasure-chests
to which everyone can go and take what he likes when he feels his
soul in a cage behind the bars of his dull days.... Have you no sense
of your own interest, you poor silly people? He demands nothing, he
complains of nothing. He has had his choice and finds that he is amply
indemnified for having squandered all his capital in tilling the
wastes; but it would be rather nice now if they were to assure him a
pittance.... So Henry dreams and scatters his fancies to the wind along
his path. Yes, of all possible employments it strikes him that this is
the one he would have accepted most gladly, for he is prepared for it
by a long apprenticeship, and he could put into it so much of himself,
so much love.
If it is for the sake of one young man of Concord that the seasons
arrange and vary their pageants, you may imagine what obligations
this favour imposes on him. Henry sets out in all weathers, from
one year’s end to another, favoured by a porous soil that is sandy
enough to absorb the water. The festival of summer offers the most
plentiful programme, of course, for there is room then for the longest
of processions from dawn till dusk, and the manager of the show is a
spendthrift. It dazzles us and leaves us with the impression of an
unequalled pomp when, after its mad extravagance, it has vanished in a
golden stream, sounding a glorious fanfare amid the blazing bonfires
of October. The illumined brow of the tiniest hill is a murmur that
mounts, swells, ends in a clamour of farewell to the great artist
who is disappearing. Every tree unites in this in the words of its
own language and the accent of its spot of soil. Listen.... The
hickories express their thanks with orange words, the oaks cry out in
scarlet that makes the blacksmith’s forge seem pale, the maples shout
with a mad note of crimson and yellow that spreads panic among the
sober-minded. A red flag unfurled would disappear in the fires of this
conflagration.
It is as if a whole wild race of beings at the point of death were
confessing at last without reserve the delirious thoughts of the
year that have ripened in the August sunlight. Every weed, to the
very rim of the forest, every leaf tries, before it vanishes, to be
as sumptuous and beautiful and tempting as a flower. Even in the
streets of Concord, under the golden ruin of the great elms, one asks
oneself how the passers-by can still cherish such beggarly thoughts.
Then Henry’s eyes, gorged with the purple, the red, the lemon-yellow,
the flame-colour, do not lose a crumb of the feast. They devour the
oriflammes of the great flag-day, offered once a year to children and
barbarians to satisfy their joy in lively colours. And at this season,
when the villagers no longer go into the woods and he is alone under
this great rose-like oak, the deep scarlet of which forms so intense
a contrast to the green of the pines, he feels stirring in himself
a veritable troop of bohemians, good-for-nothings, ne’er-do-wells,
burning to join hands and dance, shouting as if possessed.... The
long festival of summer at its mad end! It returns later, appears
for a moment to offer a last farewell, with a calm, purified serene
magnificence, in the golden days of Indian summer with their flavour
of ripe fruit, ruddy, sweet and sunny.... Yes, the summer bears on its
brow the assurance of its triumph; it has the easy pride of wealth. But
the other seasons.... Are you so blind as to ignore them?
Admit for yourself that you have never discovered what a different face
the seasons wear at home from that which they wear in the calendar.
You may know what it is to walk with great strides over a bed of dead
leaves, hearing them whisper like a crowd in a church at the entrance
of some expected personage. But it is a safe wager that you know
nothing of the real quality of those naked, desolate, paralysed days
at the end of November when a man feels that the best thing he can do
is to stay in his own hole, that there can be absolutely nothing for
him to glean amid this death of all things. But Henry has set out just
the same, without much hope in his heart; and lo and behold, in the
course of the journey through this windy desert a beautiful surprise
is waiting to feed and enchant his imagination. He returns with the
sunlight in his heart, “as if from an adventure.” What he has seen it
has required the nakedness of this dying November to permit him to
discover, and it is the very thing perhaps that he has been vainly
seeking so long in the abundance of the year. There is not a living
thing abroad but himself, not an insect, not a flower, not a reflexion
of real light, and here is this wandering lunatic, marching along with
his hands in his pockets, waiting for the dismal day to confide to him
for safe-keeping the particles of illumination and warmth that are
hidden under its desolate exterior. At this season, when the wild geese
pass in echelon, a thousand sometimes in a single day, the fancy seizes
him, when he is out of doors, to imitate their cry. The means are at
hand. You flap your elbows against your sides, then utter through your
nose, with your neck stretched out: _snowack_. It is so good that a
flock on their journey up there are positively deceived by it and do
you the honour to take you for a goose--a wild goose, let us hope.
Winter has come. His visit is due, and since the first snow-flakes
a new joy has come to take the place of the little old pleasures
that still linger on. For this jolly newcomer, who has the blood and
strength of youth, needs all the room there is. Henry’s fingers are so
numb that he cannot open his knife, and he buries them in his pockets
to feel the pulse of this youthful joy. He puts on his cloak and
mittens: it is time for him to start. Walking is hard work; he has to
plough his way, and he turns round now and then to look at the furrow
he has dug in the melting snow that covers the earth. In this cheerful
little soul who walks along with padded steps, the warmth of this
pleasure is like a log-fire in a hut in the woods in January; it is as
if the evening crickets had left their snatches of song in some nook in
the timbers to keep it cheerful till their return. Weary of all this
whiteness, his eyes fasten upon a twig of brier glimmering with such
an intense green that it seems to be the bearer of all the memories of
the shrouded earth. Two men, seen from afar in this frame fishing for
pickerel through a hole cut in the ice of the pond, look as if they had
come out of some legend.
Henry has walked into the land of metamorphoses. The pine-tree, in
its contentment, has deepened to a brown green; with its arms trimmed
to support the weight of the snow, it rises like a mass of fantastic
architecture. The miracle has spread even as far as the store in Main
Street, where the arborescence on the shop-window makes you forget the
beautiful Christmas presents that are on show there ... spread to the
very panes of your own window, which are being covered with a fern-like
growth. Winter is blossoming like the orchards in May with these
miraculous trees, each one wrought like a shrine.
He has put his boat up for the winter. But the river is still there
for those who enjoy the wind, for them more than ever. It has prepared
for them a solid floor on which they can whirl as if they were on a
race-track. The skater has a double joy; he is the horse and the rider
at once. He moves swiftly wherever his fancy takes him; the best runner
is the merest lout beside him--the man on skates makes him look like
a fool. The heavy boat was not of much use, anyway; its clumsy body
was never able to follow all the windings of the river, and it was too
timid to lead you to all the things you discover as you dart over the
immense ice-sheet of the flooded fields where the little wooden bridges
emerge like islets. Henry, an accomplished skater from childhood, can
make fifteen miles an hour against the wind without straining himself.
While the good William is covered with perspiration from the strenuous
efforts he makes to keep up, Henry merely has a little watering of the
eyes from the wind of the race. No, without winter and the kindness of
the river offering its hard back, the master would never know many of
the aspects of his domain.
Winter, the severe winter that is not a mere picture in the almanac....
When the snow-storms block trains and roads and shut people up in their
houses.... When there is not a single sleigh to be seen in the village
square, nothing but a saddle-horse that has just brought a farmer into
town, Henry has gone out just the same, as far as the post-office....
The bitter cold creeps into the house, freezes the bread, the milk and
the food in the pantry till you dread the moment when you have to go
upstairs to bed, thinking of those sheets as stiff as boards against
your cheek.... Indeed, you no longer know just how cold it is because
the mercury of the thermometer has taken refuge in the bulb, as a snail
in its shell. The earth cracks and splits; in the house the wood-work
creaks. This is no reason for ignoring what goes on out of doors; after
all, your skin is somehow related to the skin of the earth. If it
cracks too, well, you will look through the cranny.
No need to go far to find a polar landscape. Here is Baffin’s Bay,
there is Nova Zembla. The snow is waist-high. No longer any trace of
the embankment of the railroad. The farmers have become cave-dwellers;
the houses are buried half-way up the windows, but the smoke rises
from the chimneys. The houses breathe. The silence is prodigious, it
hums in your ears. The colours sing on the white sheet, red, blue,
straw-yellow, purple, green, orange, russet, tawny. The light is pink,
and your shadow a deep indigo.
What has the finest log-fire to say to those slippered folk who have
never left the chimney-corner when the moonlight on the snow leads you
by the hand through an enchanted palace, or on those days when the
south wind melts the snow and the uncovered earth exhales an odour that
invigorates you like the scent of strong meat, or on those evenings
when you come back armoured in ice because it has rained while you are
out and you are coated with rime like a gingerbread man?
Is there any romance comparable to the events of a walk on a winter’s
day? The song that rises to your lips ... the echo that comes back to
you deadened because the snow has kept a good share of the sound of
your voice ... those vermilion berries sparkling with ice ... that
hardened ground offering you a footway in all directions where you were
never able to take a step in mild weather ... the living warmth that
smoulders under the red catkins of the alders and in the blue of the
silhouette of that Persian, with his hatchet in his hand, so tall, so
imposing, so admirable that you would like to present your respects to
him, just as if he were not your own shadow on the ice of the pond....
Winter, hard winter, great banks of snow without which you would never
have known that downy intimacy in the padded hollows of the old earth,
season of the warm, quick heart under the frost! Now, remembering the
summer, you ask if winter is not also a person of substance, concealing
under his white furs the rarest jewels of the year.
And that matchless moment when the spring breaks, just begins to
break--what do you make of that? If you remain in the back of your shop
while outside the wings of the swallows brush a man who is seeking for
an answer to the disquietude he has borne within him in the bleak
February or March landscape, you are a poor wretch who has deliberately
deprived himself of the cream of earthly emotions. You are to be
pitied if you have never prowled about then to receive the surprise
of the first signs. The winter for you has been merely a torpor, and
the end of winter will only be a renewal of the same old play, Rubbing
Along--with the same old scenery.
The first bee has come out with numbed wings in search of the first
calyx. This man has come forth too, for he has been on the alert ever
since that day at the end of February when he found on the willows and
the osiers an unusual lustre of red and green. He is expecting great
news. Amid the dead leaves and the melted snow of a ditch he has seen
two yellow-spotted turtles moving. He is greatly stirred because of a
certain quality in the air which makes him think he is going to hear a
bluebird sing. He looks for signs that will bear out his presentiment.
On the watch from the ridges, he scrutinizes the deep blue of the
inundated fields where cakes of ice are drifting about, and upon this
mass of water which covers a good quarter of the land of the township
there is a little shining white spot that catches his attention: he
discovers through his glass that this is a little sheldrake which, with
its companion, has taken possession of the waters. So one couple is
already there, awaiting the coming of the procession. No more does he
himself intend to miss the first measures of the music announcing its
approach.
March thrills with the anxiety of a man who is following the steps of
the resurrection. A robin has called, _svit, svit_. The black waves of
the river have almost a grassy smell. There are sea-gulls in the air.
The lookout-man scrutinizes the earth: bare and tawny, it reappears
in spots, its bosom exposed to the rains that are going to fertilise
it. The buds of the red maples are swelling. On a beautiful clear day,
after a night of frost the sap flows if he makes an incision. Henry
collects the sap to make maple sugar. He draws from his tubes four and
a half pints, boils them down and obtains an ounce and a half of sugar.
Fine. But his father cannot understand why anyone should bother to make
bad sugar when it is so easy to get good sugar at the grocer’s. His
father is right, as fathers always are. It is because he does not feel
the maple-sap flowing in himself. There is no sap in his pencils.
Walking along his favourite path, the railroad-track, towards the
middle of March, when he hears the bluebirds and sees them flying,
Henry has a feeling of deliverance, as if some band that confined his
chest had burst. He would like to fall on his knees and embrace the
earth. The sound of a wood-cutter’s axe in the forest lightens his
heart. What doubts can he have henceforth? From a pool deep in the
woods comes the faintly perceptible _wurrk, wurrk, wur r r k wurk_ of
a frog, a treasure to this keen ear that catches it. The air grows
softer, an overcoat becomes troublesome. When the brooks break up, the
saunterer sets out along the banks to hear the song of their awakening
and watch the floating procession of the little rafts of ice. The fish
hasten up-stream, for they too have heard the great news and wish
to have the details. New arrivals are to be observed on all sides,
a procession of travellers returning after a long absence. How many
things they have to tell one another!
One day a boat appears, freshly painted, setting out to reconnoitre in
the cold clearness. In the distance the village looks like a low island
lying in the water. The wind brings you an odour of musk. The note of
a bird that has come back sounds joyously in the woods as if he were
giving a house-warming there. Since the birds have returned, there is
one man in the village who rises before daybreak and goes out to hear
them in the dawn of things, a man who can sleep no longer when he has
heard that call flung from the tops of the elms along the street. A man
who must needs inhale the scent of the earth in the early morning, a
gardener who, when he plants his spade in the soil of his garden, once
released from the frost, has a feeling of victory, not so much perhaps
at the thought of the seeds he is going to entrust to it again as
because of this new life which, stronger than the shoots of April, he
feels germinating in himself.
No use for you to say, to excuse your own inertia, that this man
owes to the unique quality of his senses the enjoyment he derives
from a spectacle in the midst of which the village is monumentally
indifferent. For nature has made him all nerves--visual, olfactory,
auditory, gustatory, tactile. Henry, the virginal New Englander, is
repaid for his chastity by the most voluptuous delights of the senses.
It is a great pity if you have not been repaid for your own; but is
that an excuse? The voice of sex has remained silent in him, or he has
silenced it by a strict discipline for reasons of his own--because his
race, his temperament, the gods of Concord demand it, and then because
... because that is the way things go, it makes no difference: nature
will have her due. Henry drinks water, but the essences of the waste
lands intoxicate him. There is no symphony orchestra in the village,
but a common accordeon or a hand-organ in the street is enough to wring
his heart, and a simple music-box enchants him. He eats little or no
meat but no epicure could scent with a more delicate nostril the savour
of a solitude that is peopled with secret lives. If carnal emotion at
the sight of the human body has not been annihilated in him, it cowers
in the darkness of so deep a cave that you will never catch a glimpse
of it. But he has at his command five scouts who always have marvellous
things to relate when they return to their master. They are able to
put such delicate perception, such freshness into their reports that
he could listen to them forever. Seeing, tasting, touching, hearing,
smelling are a matchless intoxication when you are served by such
stewards and have a soul in which their least declaration echoes and
re-echoes.
Henry’s virility lurks in his eye. He has a look that envelops and
penetrates pitilessly a piece of the landscape and probes you to the
bottom if you form a part of it. Among the plants, the dead leaves and
the debris he distinguishes some tiny creature which, to the ordinary
passer-by, would be lost among the colours of the soil. But this man
with the senses of a savage relies especially upon his ear and his
sense of smell: a thing betrays or confesses its presence by the sound
it makes or the odour it gives off. The thrush’s song in the woods
touches the depths of his soul, but all space is strewn with fragments
of music that ravish him, as a child is enchanted by the tinkling of
crystal or the tick-tack of a watch. When he wishes to hear the news
of the world Henry puts his ear close to the telegraph-poles along
the railroad. You could never explain how astonished you are by this
murmur of the ocean that reaches you from the heart of a vibrating
mast. It is the same continuous story that a shell tells you when
you put it to your ear, but far greater, infinitely richer and more
sonorous. The listener, alone at the foot of the pole, far away from
the post-office, receives a flood of communications; he cannot make
out the words but their music is enough for him. It is as if they had
been round the world before coming to ring through the pores of the
wood; they have travelled so far that to receive them you wish you had
a larger frame. The dispatches vary according to the humour of the day,
the direction of the wind, the quality of the air. Henry never fails
to stop as he passes and listen to see if there is a message for him.
Very strange, the playing of this harp. You might pass twenty times
and hear nothing but a vague trill; and then, all at once, some fine
day, as if tremendous things were happening in the world, the wires
begin to vibrate with an unheard-of intensity and volume. What you hear
is yours alone; you may be sure that no one is eavesdropping at any
other receiving-pole unless some youngster is amusing himself as you
are, listening to the music, so much more beautiful than that of the
locomotive passing along the track.
Henry’s big nose is no useless ornament: when he breathes the smoke
of burning leaves or the first waterlily of the season that has just
opened at dawn, all his quick sensibility flows into the sense of
smell. Of the five messengers, this is the most faithful; its report
carries conviction. When he picks a plant, Henry first smells it to
see if he knows it; and even in re-reading some page he has written he
_smells_ what is good and what ought to be rejected. The surrounding
country is full of floating aromas that have come heaven knows whence,
varying with the hours and the seasons but always there, and sometimes
so fragrant as to make you think that your adventure has led you to the
shores of the Moluccas, the Spice Islands.
And you speak of renunciation in connection with a penniless man who
has for his daily bread such delights as these! When you see the
wanderer returning from his rounds, perhaps chewing a stalk, you
would not fling him a glance of contemptuous pity if you knew what
he has brought back with him. First of all, good folk of Concord, the
satisfaction of a man who has not wasted his day. A good walker, he
has zigzagged about for miles. On the way back he has spent a quarter
of an hour perhaps on the cliff, watching the sun sinking behind the
Peterboro hills and blazing in the windows of the first houses in the
village. Wachusett, all by itself over there, looked like a whale this
evening at sunset. And with this sumptuous vision he returns, as the
bats are flitting about, just as you are on your way to the post-office
to get your own news.
In his pockets he carries the spoils of the day: notes that he has
scribbled on his walk as a painter jots down a hasty outline in his
sketch-book, and perhaps a few lucky finds, plant or fruit, egg or
bit of moss, flint or bark. But among these finds there is one you
would never count, if you were allowed to plunge your hand to the very
bottom of his big pockets or even into that surprise-hat. It takes up
much less room than a handful of huckleberries or chestnuts. The best
of the spoils--can you guess what it is? It is the invigorated mind,
the soul that has been stretched by the adventure of the day.... This
imponderable that he has brought home from the wastes to fertilise
his life and enrich his humanity is a rather big affair, you see,
brothers.... This lesson he has received from the plants and the trees
in the art of self-expression.... These spoils that a rambler has taken
from your orchards and fields, you farmers of Concord.... This barely
visible green which the plants and the mosses have left on his elbows
and his knees.... This earth that he brings back on his boots, full of
things to be born which have made the journey with him and for which he
cares so much....
In the evening, in his room, when the shopkeepers are making up their
books and the farmers are counting the loads of hay that have been
brought in, Henry does not forget to note down these discoveries.
They are not expressed in figures, hardly in words. They are not even
palpable. But they fecundate the page that he is adding to his Journal.
For is it not a Henry-still-to-be-found that he has followed as a
hunter follows the trail through all the zigzags of his walk? Is it
not, after all, a reflexion of himself, in these faces in the verdure
and the water, in these cries, this silence, this wildness, these
odours, this swarming growth, these blue shadows on the snow--is it not
himself that he has glimpsed at the end of the path?
* * * * *
Extraordinarily enough, one April evening in 1844 the man of the wilds
returned from his walk not alone nor with one companion but accompanied
by a whole troop of villagers. What was the meaning of this unusual
spectacle?
It was Town-Meeting Day, a serious ceremony in a democratic community
and one at which every loyal citizen, proud of being a necessary unit,
was expected to be on hand. Henry, who had no love for voting and
debating, nor any pride in the exercise of his civic rights, did not
feel that his presence was indispensable. If he failed in his duty as a
citizen and a unit, well, he could survive it. This little celebration
was not for him. Let every man mind his own business. This day was
plainly intended for a spring-time exploration; young Edward, still in
college and Henry’s comrade because he was the brother of his friend
Elizabeth Hoar, was going with him. They were to set off by boat on the
river, and they were not coming back till they had found the sources
of the Sudbury River. They were going to camp on the bank unless they
found a farmhouse where they could spend the night. They were taking
their fishing-tackle with them, having decided to live like savages
on their catch. A magnificent prospect, while the citizens, conscious
of their duties and their rights, were worthily spending the day
palavering.
So they had set off, light-hearted, as in the old days when the big
brother had gone off with the younger on a long adventure. They had
forgotten the matches for the camp-fire, an omission that could be
repaired happily at the cobbler’s, near the point of embarkation. It
would be no sort of day without matches for two fellows gaily setting
out over the world.
As the spring had not been rainy, the river was low and they caught
some fish. When the time came for lunch they landed on the shore of
Fairhaven Pond, the big bay with its little island adjoining the
richest provinces of the domain. The two explorers had started a fire
in a sunny hollow, a long way from the woods; they were about to eat
their fish and they had the appetite of cannibals. But, lo and behold,
if the tall, dry last year’s grass didn’t catch fire like tinder about
the camp! They tried to put it out with their hands, then by beating
it with a board, but all in vain. The flames were already eating their
way up the slope and the underbrush was crackling.... They were stunned
for a moment. “Where will this end?” asked young Edward, whose father,
the old Senator, was one of the bigwigs of the village. The flames in
their headlong joy were rushing towards the top of the slope and the
woods in a transport of victory and Henry was sure they were going to
devour everything. The woods once reached, it would certainly be the
village next; the fire would descend upon the assembled citizens who
were debating and voting. So there was nothing to do now but to run
and charitably warn them of what was threatening. Edward, very much
excited, leapt into the boat to go back by water. Henry, speeding
through the woods by his usual short-cuts, would reach the village
before him and give the alarm.
It was a bad business, but how could they have foreseen it? Many and
many a time they had lighted a fire out of doors and burned a little
of the surrounding grass without doing any harm. These furious flames
had the most definite and perverse intentions: they were like a tidal
wave of red rebels, even surer of their rights than the citizens over
there. Henry raced through the woods, and, looking back, saw the great
cloud of smoke behind him. The first man he met was a farmer driving a
team who, when he was told what the smoke meant, cheerfully jogged on
again: it was not his woods that were burning. But that other man over
there in his field happened to be the owner of the woodlot where the
flames were crackling at that very moment. He followed the messenger
on the run towards the fire: but what could they do, two men, even if
one of them was the owner, before that crepitating wave of assault?...
A hundred cords of wood, ready for delivery, were threatened with
disaster. They must go for help.
Henry was out of breath. He was going to stay there and wait for
events, while the owner went for reinforcements. The battle-front now
extended over half a mile. Henry watched it rushing on. It was a fine
spectacle. He had forgotten all about Wheeler, the man to whom the
largest of the threatened woodlots belonged. He was a deacon, yes,
just so, as chance would have it. You go off fishing and light a fire
to cook your catch and innocently set fire to a deacon’s woodlot. Just
Henry’s luck. It was too bad about that fellow--but the devil take him
anyway! Perhaps these woods that praised God in their own fashion
were tired of belonging to a deacon. So crackle, beautiful flames, be
as red as you like, beautiful logs! It will take away from you the
taste of the deacon. Henry climbed to the top of the cliff to enjoy
the spectacle better; and sitting on a rock he watched the flames
leaping for joy, escaping with a hiss from their old prison under the
bark, spreading so rapidly that they threatened to surround him, high
up as he was--watching with the satisfied eye of an artist. The fire
licked the roots of the pines, then sprang with one leap to their tops.
The squirrels beat a retreat, the wood-pigeons flew away through the
smoke. He heard the alarm-bell in the village. This was a moment worth
living. Just before, when he was running to warn the people, Henry
had felt rather sheepish; but now a pure joy blazed up in him at this
conflagration that seemed to have been decreed by the solitary Nero
calmly seated on the top of the rock, enjoying the spectacle while the
rescuers were approaching.
For several hours he fought the fire with the others who were dashing
about. Result: a hundred acres burned over, including many young
trees. He had no reason to feel so proud--or to be astonished at being
called a “damned rascal” by those whose woods had suffered. As for the
crowd that had rushed up from the village, they seemed to be tacitly
grateful to the good-for-nothing who had provided them with this free
conflagration to crown their Town-Meeting Day.
After all, if anyone had reason to be grieved, was it not Henry
himself, thinking of the beautiful young trees that had been destroyed?
He who owned the woods by a different right than the persons who had
paid their market-value in mere greenbacks? He who loved them for
themselves and not for the number of cords of wood that could be got
from them? Walking through the burned woodland alone that night to see
if the insurrection had been entirely quelled, the incendiary thought
of the fresh shoots that would spring up with new life through the
charred surface.
On the spot where they had had their interrupted lunch lay those
blessed fish, shamefaced and shrivelled, as if they were the real
culprits.
V
In spite of all, dear Concord, a man would have to be very perverse
and strangely made not to accept you with all your faults, your
absurdities, the petty prosaicness of your townspeople.... Not to
embrace you as heartily as the river-bank embraces your Main Street,
without debating your good and your evil.... Not to respond with a
smile to the smiling unison of this little world where farmers and
citizens, tradesmen, workmen, store-keepers, educated people, after the
purest tradition of democratic equality and simplicity, are scarcely
distinguishable from one another.... In the shade of those great
elms that spread harmony over all, how can one fail to feel tenderly
sympathetic with this family of honest souls?
See the two white churches there, the tavern and the jail, where they
will receive you without the least compunction. Few of the things are
absent from the village that make the solid happiness of the world.
Not even a bowling green and a centre of high culture. There is the
Mill-dam, where the people gossip and munch the news of the day, the
blacksmith’s, the post-office, the shops. And the little wooden houses
with their Doric pediments, painted white, with the gardens stretching
down to the willows to reach the water. Everything is in its place,
everything in concord. The village sings in its grey-white, in the
green of the meadows and the pine-crowned hills, with the approbation
of those beautiful big maples on the common, as serene as philosophers.
And on Sunday, when no townsman would have the bad taste to abuse the
peace of the Sabbath by playing the piano or taking his skates to
the river, and an awful silence reigns over the wooden sidewalks, how
good it would be to allow oneself to be carried along by the godly
simplicity of the town, dozing blissfully to the sound of the clock
that spreads the enchantment of submission.
Yes, indeed.... And there are moments when Henry could envelop in his
affection all the households of dear Concord. For example, when he sees
the roofs smoking far away over the crests of the young elms; when
humanity melts into the landscape or is only heard in the sound of an
anvil, the shout of a ploughman with his team. At such moments as these
he was in concord too. From a distance it was so easy to believe that
people lived there whose daily life flowed like the river that bears
you along as it gives you its freshness. Why, when you have taken part
since your infancy in the activities of the village, are you not the
dupe of appearances? The smile of Concord hides so many ugly thoughts,
mean habits, dull conventions; there is so much tacit deceit in its
simplicity. Why has not nature made you complete by granting you the
adaptability that accommodates itself to the little frauds of ordinary
life, to the devious path that discreetly spins the thread of its days?
It is not Henry’s fault if he is at odds with it all. Instead of the
treasures of indulgence that nature might have given him, she has
provided him with a sense of smell too subtle not to be offended by its
odours of routine and rapacity. He thinks of that old farmer, living
alone on his big farm with a man to do his housekeeping for him, who
gets up every morning in mid-winter, when everything is frozen hard,
between three and four o’clock, puts on his boots and his coat, lights
his lantern and goes out to the barn to milk his seventeen cows. Of
course it is warm in the stable near the cows, but just the same....
Rich, without heirs, he yokes himself to this task of milking, his one
satisfaction in life being to fulfil punctiliously the function of a
miser. You see him returning to the house, his morning task ended, and
eating the breakfast his man has prepared while the master was at work
at the seventeen udders. All very fine, you say. But how surprised he
would be one of these nights, when the animals begin to talk, if he
heard a sisterly cow say to him: “Go back to bed, old man, and when
you wake up glance over your accounts again. See how much cream your
life has given you for all that your pails of milk have furnished.”...
Obstinate soul, perverse rebel, not to be able to forgive these
virtuous farmers because, while their first concern is to fill their
barns with good hay, they think they absolve themselves from the sin of
avarice by posing as protectors of letters and the arts.
In the good society of Concord he finds himself among notables of
Philistia who like to feel that they are the choice spirits of New
England. These are the upper spheres of the village. Henry avoids
them, for his lungs are not adapted to the air they breathe there. The
language and attitudes of society people have the unfailing effect of
precipitating the mercury of his thermometer to the bulb. On the rare
occasions when he has been exposed to the hostile and malign influences
that float in the humblest parlour, the experience has left him with a
bad memory. It is there that you encounter those people who say to you,
with their faces shining with amiability: “Oh, my dear fellow, how well
I understand your love of nature.... It is so poetic....”
The victim has his ferocious words or silences for cases of this kind.
If the lover of “nature” and “the poetic” were shrewd enough, he could
collect a good pint of the most acid disgust this mouth and these
pursed lips are able to distil.
He cannot always avoid the peril under its most artful forms. When he
has charge of the lectures at the village Lyceum, he cannot refuse to
carry the manuscript of the distinguished lecturess who is going to
discourse this evening on Woman: she has rolled it up in a handkerchief
and he has thrust it into his pocket before returning it to her. He
would be very glad to fulfil with stoical politeness for half an hour
the obligations of ladies’ man, but he would be happier if his pocket,
the next morning, did not retain such a fragrant reminder of the lady,
of her manuscript and her dressing-table. Feminism and perfumery have
craftily conspired to get the best of his lining. Similarly, when he
has allowed himself to be taken across the threshold of some stifling
room where, under the pretext of a “soiree,” thirty-odd idle women,
young or not so young, are chattering, simpering, warbling, in company
with various gentlemen who are dumb with admiration, the sad thing is
not merely the two mortal hours that he has passed there, wretched and
humiliated: the worst is the shame afterwards of his own weakness which
has prevented him from fleeing on the spot or committing some enormity
that would spread panic in this dovecote. The pretty girl to whom they
have presented him would have been charming perhaps if she had been
willing to keep still among all these ladybirds. In masculine society,
after a social dinner well seasoned with anecdotes, he feels just as
unhappy till he is past the door and free. In vain Henry holds himself
on the defensive: on another occasion there is that benign soul who
intrudes upon him with an oily affection for his person, an odious,
vulgar familiarity.
In the presence of these samples of cultivated humanity, Henry’s
natural stiffness is intensified and he becomes so icy that it is
difficult to imagine him ever laughing--as a good lady had the
hardihood to remark to him one day: she had never heard him in his
gay moods, for she had encountered him only during a call in a region
where, owing to the atmosphere, the laughter of this laugher was
extinguished. The polite people of the village, the church-goers,
those upright and self-sufficient folk, provoke his curt witticisms,
the sharp rejoinders that suddenly rivet a fellow, with outstretched
wings, like an owl over a barn door. Henry inevitably reaps antipathies
and lasting enmities. The clever ones think that he wants to astonish
and scandalize people by his paradoxes. They think he is pretentious.
His reputation for merciless satire and a cynical misanthropy, odd to
the point of perversity, is of his own making. If you roundly abuse
philanthropy and philanthropists, of course it shows that you are
not very anxious to win the esteem of the world. The plain-dealer
sometimes amuses himself with this game of massacre, delights in
sharpening his sarcasms, but without wasting any considerable time
on the characters who play in the village comedy: the keenest of his
sarcasms is to ignore them. When they come to his attention he packs
them off as intruders: let these fine-mannered gentry air their graces
somewhere else and leave common mortals alone. A substantial citizen,
whoever he may be, is always a slightly ludicrous animal in the eyes
of a workingman like Henry. A man’s virtue is all nonsense if it is
disconnected from his sins.
Happily Concord has something more than the silence of its elms and
maples to unite it with the true humanity. It also possesses those
congenial souls who gather about the Sage in the household where Henry
has been living, a spiritual family whose friendship has a far better
flavour than all the sarcasms. The pipe and frock of Edmund Hosmer,
that shrewd farmer who knows what the earth is made of, make up for
all these mean peasants. Amos Bronson Alcott, who has returned from
an adventure in which he has vainly tried to consummate the marriage
of dreams and reality in a paradisical existence, may be a cause
of wit in others, but his presence is really like an anticipation
or a recollection of the golden age. Henry has no particular taste
for the sky-blue tint of his idealism, so delightful to old maids
who are devoured by spiritual love, but he feels a brother in this
poor dreamer who is so helplessly unfitted to follow the ways of the
world. He lends him a good hand and digs beside him, when Alcott is
settling at Hillside. In every stroke that he takes with the pickaxe,
as they sweat side by side on the slope, the beautiful Platonic dreams
incarnate themselves in the shape of friendship. Henry is not unhappy
as a comrade and handyman in the service of philosophy. Who knows
but the good Alcott’s immense generosity of soul does not exist to
counterbalance all the miserliness of the neighbourhood?
With Hawthorne one doesn’t turn up the earth. In the company of this
imposing personage, a simple heart sheathed in solemn gravity, Henry
is inclined to present rather an iron visage: like black cloth and
corduroy, they are somehow unable to be friends. In handing over his
boat to him--the boat of the great voyage, which he manages like a
virtuoso--Henry, the dry joker, remarks: “It’s a boat that manages
itself, you see.” The grave Hawthorne tries it, with the awkwardness of
a beginner, and the boat, deprived of its soul, obeys no more.
Of this spiritual family, however, the one who is most closely akin
to him is William. They have been comrades since the days before
Henry’s departure for Staten Island. William Ellery Channing, one
year younger than himself, is the nephew of a Unitarian minister, a
professor at Harvard. He has married a sister of Margaret Fuller, the
animating spirit of the _Dial_. An odd soul, whimsical, fanciful, not
very sociable, childlike, hard to please, charming, full of imagination
and in other respects the best companion in the world. William also
writes verses, but in other respects, in spite of his independence,
he is not wholly exempt from a touch of Philistinism. He has a knack
of sharpening Henry’s love of paradox and leads him rather to force
the expression of his cynicism in regard to the civilised; but he is
an invaluable friend for toning you up again when you are feeling a
little slack. And when they set out together for an afternoon’s ramble
they are the happiest of comrades, welcoming the surprises of the road
in the intoxication of an open-air chat. Of all possible cronies he
is almost the only one whom Henry accepts, the only one who does not
throw a blot upon his afternoon landscape; with William he can have a
silent understanding. To whom but William then, and those fields that
are free from fine manners, do you show yourself as you are, with your
boyish zest, your fits of gaiety, the bursts of buffoonery that make
you dance and leap over the ice when you are skating? William is the
witness of those spontaneous moments when the spleen of a young man who
has been frozen by the sight of stupidity breaks and falls into pieces
like a mask of clay. What is under the mask reveals itself only to this
friendly nature, this friend after one’s own heart.
A lover of the wilds can enjoy friendships like this that establish
in the greyness of the village a few luminous points proclaiming the
presence of his own kind. Why are they not always complete enough to
satisfy him fully? Too often Henry feels a kind of embarrassment in
his relations with brotherly minds. The impediment is not of his own
willing. He asks to be filled to the brim, and these half-unbosomings
leave him dissatisfied with himself and others. When he is away from
them, alone in the woods, it seems to him that the silence of his
surroundings speaks of a truer friendship than that which he feels in
their company: it is a silence whose “yes” melts all discords. A tree
knows the art of winning you without discussion, while in the presence
of a human face you resist, you are a stubborn mule, a bellicose
intransigent who will not appear to approve of what he condemns and
then demolishes his adversary--his friend--with blows of crabbed
speechlessness or bitter irony. A human face is a provocation; at the
least pretext you discharge a “no” that shoots like an arrow.
Even among such friends as these, if an opinion, a gesture, an attitude
happens not to suit him, Henry rolls up into a ball and erects his
quills. Touch him then if you dare. Look at him, bristling with
resistance, ready to defend his position against all comers, fiercely
resolved not to yield an inch of ground. No doubt the ground is too
precious for him to sacrifice an inch of it. Pride? Conceit? Touchy
susceptibility? It is rather an excessive, irreducible, militant
devotion to various axioms that he identifies with himself. The gods
have made a Henry who is all of a piece, and they have placed him on
the earth among objects and souls that are different and queer. He
reacts. He has no particular desire to please you. But you happen to
be his friend. Well, one owes a friend the purest truth one has. If
friendship ceases to be a perfect harmony, it is a struggle, not an
exchange of concessions. So Henry abruptly says his “no”: forces rush
from all the provinces composing the individual Henry Thoreau, throwing
into disorder everything in their way. He must attest, amplify, exalt
the difference, to establish the fact that he is this and not that.
The Sage, a friend of long standing, knows something about all this:
the ferocity of this instinct of contradiction shocks the man with the
exquisite and conciliatory smile, though it does not cool his affection
for this headstrong soul who sometimes puts his patience to a severe
test. The other friends are also very familiar with their “terrible
Thoreau” in whose eyes esteem seems to be the strongest of reasons
never to capitulate. And they allow themselves to be cut by his plain
speaking or bitten by his caustic spirit, on occasion, since he will
not give himself on any other terms. A naked simplicity is necessary
to this fearfully difficult man. Manners fill him with horror, like an
indecency. If you allow him to see that after all you belong to a world
in which the desire to be correct and respectable taints your gestures
or speech, well, for the moment that is the end of your understanding.
You have shown the tip of the black cloth from which the frock-coats
are cut. To be a man, a plain man, would be so fine and so sincere. Why
this smooth, mealymouthed parlour-talk? Henry retires into his shell of
silence. This is not the sort of thing he was expecting from you.
As for those people who are as sober as a church-pew, they cannot
understand why a savage wants to whet his fancy and his paradoxes and
gravely make a butt of their respectable heads. Innocent souls who
are skilled in cleaving the interstellar spaces but whose terrestrial
envelope is of a prudently bourgeois cut have difficulty in adapting
themselves to the diapason of an artistic sensibility. That is why
Henry, who is both savage and artist, never feels so fully as at the
times when he is away from his friends the value of a friendship that
would have the serenity of a landscape in which every blade of grass
has a true word to say.
However it may be with men and their manners, Concord is in the centre
of a territory that is rich in living springs where all deceit is
drowned, and Henry has his home with his own family in the heart of
Concord. In the great kingdom of the afternoons--wind, sun or snow--the
little kingdom of morning, evening, night--shelter, stability, ties:
the house, the garden.
The little kingdom is peopled, not like the great, with secret lives
and furtive encounters as he passes, but with beings to whom he is
united more closely than by blood: by the memories of childhood and
their sweetness, strong as the memory of a brother, the sharing of
every day, and the tenderness that cannot refuse itself. There is his
mother, lively, talkative, full of geniality, the animating spirit
of the little house, skilful in the art of making a little go a long
way when times are hard, a housekeeper as heedful of the comfort of
the boarders who are entertained at the family table as in mending
the pockets of her son’s trousers. There is his father whom nature
has endowed with a middling stature and an air of prudence, a rather
retiring man because not destined to command but to find his way in a
tacit submission to the justifiable authority of his wife. As nature
has not developed in him to excess the imaginative and poetical sense,
he is the better able to play the part of a cautious, circumspect
little father who looks after his pencils, attends to his work,
silently, sedulously, with a mind set on details, good man that he
is. And then Sophia and Helen, Henry’s two sisters--Helen, the elder,
with the big eyes, the strong nose and a mouth as expressive as her
brother’s. Finally, Aunt Sophia and the devoted Aunt Louisa, when one
or the other happens to be living with the family.
This is the harmonious household the thought of which filled with such
ardent melancholy the heart of the exile in the Judge’s house, as if
he had heard from afar the shrill sound of the delicious music-box,
the gift of Richard, Margaret Fuller’s brother, with which the family
regaled itself in the evening. At home, the ne’er-do-well, the
jack-of-all-trades cheerfully does his share of the work, taking charge
of all the small tasks that need to be done.
The valuable little services that he renders his family extend even
to his boat, which not only bears occasionally the two noble dames,
Sophia and his mother, who enjoy a trip on the river in the evening,
but serves him for gathering driftwood to stock the wood-pile. The wood
that he hoists on board with a pole and then carries on his back to the
house, saws and splits with his hands, has a tawny life that warms you
a great deal better than the rotten wood these silly rich people buy
at so much a cord; for you have already sweated in transporting it and
cutting it up, and when you see its flames dancing the trouble it has
given you makes them dance all the more merrily. It is wood which, far
from costing you anything, gives you returns. It is of every kind and
has plenty of stories to tell you--old pickets, old planks, old stumps,
dead trees, condemned, adventurous timbers which, instead of rotting in
their abandonment, are going to give the Thoreaus before they vanish
the last rays of their glowing hearts, leaving beautiful ashes that
will be valuable for washing.
In the garden, it goes without saying, Henry’s function is as important
as that of his mother in the house. He raises enough potatoes for the
needs of the table and occasionally has some to sell. You can order
them by the bushel from the market, if you prefer. You can settle
yourself in your slippers in a corner by the fire, without knowing
what it is to have logs from your own wood-pile. You can taste the joy
of living like a potato or a stump. But he is a gardener to whom the
potatoes, even before they have been gathered, have given something
more nourishing than their starch. Henry’s work in his garden brings
with it another recompense than the beauty of the melons, the pumpkins,
the fruit-trees, the rose-bushes that he cultivates. Besides, the
garden is that one place in all the world where the home is contiguous
to the earth.
When the family is obliged to leave the big house where they have lived
for seven years, the Parkman house in the centre of the village where
the school was begun, a scheme is adopted which they could not have
conceived, still less executed, without the boy’s aid. For the question
is one of building a house. They are going to live at the end of the
world, in a lane on the other side of the railroad. A big undertaking,
a man’s work, to excavate the earth and lay the foundations, pave the
cellar, take the measurements, collect the materials. He would be happy
to do it for other people; he is still happier to do it for his own
family. Henry does the digging, the masonry, the carpentry, the slating
with his father. He plants the fruit-trees. There is a fine view from
the house; and besides, it is somewhat sheltered from the routine and
the tittle-tattle of the village. He will be able to sleep well under
this modest roof that he has put up himself.
Aside from the aid of his skilful and inventive hands, the man of the
wilds does not refuse his family that best of himself of which he
is far from lavish outside. What the chestnut is to the bur the big
child who amuses himself by the half-hour with the kitten or dances a
jig with his intimates is to the “terrible Thoreau” of those sharp
replies. Is he tamed then? Well, perhaps so, if you mean by this that
his resistance, in the family circle, adopts a tolerant and courteous
manner--which his friends would greatly appreciate. If, at table, the
maternal voice occasionally interrupts your dialogue with a friend, why
vent your ill-humour instead of listening till this gifted woman has
had her say? Her son patiently lets the downpour pass, as if he were
under a pine-tree in the woods, and at the last drops acquiesces with a
little bow: “Shall I take the liberty ... my turn?”--then resumes the
interrupted discussion. Because he himself despises the newspapers, is
he going to cast a scoffing or disdainful glance towards his father,
deep in the paper he is reading from the first line to the last, with
the touching faith of an honest shopkeeper? Nothing more natural than
that the good man should like to roll the lollipop of the “latest news”
in his mouth to get rid of the taste of the lead. Let him roll it as
much as he likes and go up to bed: his son will not plague him with
demands for advice, for he relies for everything on his own personal
experience and looks for little or nothing from the knowledge of his
elders. Henry’s indulgence is not blind. He knows the prejudices, the
limitations of this beloved little house, and he notes them on occasion
in his Journal. But his home is an indisputable reality to which he
comes back every evening, on his return from an adventure, finding
there certain special ways that may not have very much in common with
his inner life but that belong to him just the same, exactly how he
could hardly say--his father’s love of good work, for instance, a
perfect pencil or a phrase that hits the bull’s-eye, and his mother’s
vivacity of imagination and lively spirits that are always ready for
a little mischief. And if the sisters, the excellent aunts alone
had been there to warm the wanderer, all his roads would still have
converged towards this fixed light.
Is the little flame of the family fire fed at the same sources as those
wandering lights that attract his eye on his walks and make him stop
as he stops before his friends the trees? But that is another story.
These lights are not will-o’-the-wisps but miraculous beings that win
the favour of an unsociable soul, as if they had no connection with
a humanity that he has tried and condemned. Go and ask the cleverest
person in the village to explain this strange fact to you: you have
heard of a young fellow who is intolerably conceited, who affects a
gruff, stiff, top-lofty air when he is in company--such is the report
of the polite people--and this workingman here, if you happen to ask
him whether he knows this boy, tells you that he is the most amiable
of companions.... Then there are two Henry Thoreaus in Concord?
The workingman tells you about a delightful boy, sincere, simple,
always ready to do you a good turn and always to be depended upon; in
describing him he uses the sort of words that come to you when you are
speaking of a brother, without the least allusion to his conceit, his
stiffness, his sarcasms. He does not know of any other Henry Thoreau;
there is no other in Concord.... It is simply incomprehensible. And you
will never understand it if you are not of the understanding kind.
There exist, in fact, among the human fauna of this village, of all
villages, magicians who have the power of calling this other Henry
instantly into life, the Henry whose friendship is gained for all time
by his own kind. There are certain characters who have no part in
Concord society--obscure little nameless people, men who do odd jobs,
farm-hands, small farmers, and there are people of dubious reputation,
bad boys, who are akin to the waste lands, fishermen, Irishmen,
wood-cutters, small fry, loafers, weeds in the eyes of the village
bigwigs. Henry finds them very much to his taste. These latter are real
people, not play-actors. The artist is touched, the heart of the man is
captured. The grain of sympathy that is buried in the depths of this
unsociable soul can rise to the surface just the same. And he shows
them his true face, which is unknown to the prosperous townspeople, the
well-to-do farmers and the deacons.
When he sees one-eyed Goodwin, the tough old fisherman, making for
the river-bank at any hour of the day, small and thick-set under his
old oil-cloth coat, carrying his basket and pole or fetching home
in a handcart the wood he has collected in his boat, or dressed in
his short blue frock, chopping stumps for his winter after having
laid wall all day, Henry feels less isolated among men. Goodwin, the
vicious character, as the good people call him, puts a little poetry
into their sanctimonious dullness. He lives his life cheerily in the
freshness of the river and the fields, far from all these souls who are
so poor in imagination and sincerity. It is the same way with those
hunters, drunkards, rascals who are periodically sent to serve a term
in the House of Correction, like that big, lanky young blackguard of
a Melvin, with his baskets and his game-bag, accompanied by his lean,
bluish-white, black-spotted hound, who are so much more your own kind
than the village lawyer. Their gunshots sound so free in the woods,
and you remember the time when you wandered about the country like
these blessed pagans for hours with John. Melvin is an antidote to the
morality of the deacons. Melvin is a part of the beauty of Concord.