Early in the month it was delightfully warm: one saw the little yellow
butterflies fluttering about, encouraged by this smiling Indian Summer.
And then it turned cold after the middle of November; it was necessary
to pull up the last turnips in the garden to save them from the frost.
What joyous walks one had during the days when the first crust of ice
resisted the sun! But it was December now. The winter was driving down
as brutally as a wedge. Over the fields the crows flocked together in
vast protesting flocks. A heavy snow covered the countryside. It was
a beautiful soft mantle that you trampled down in silence, carrying
the feathers on your boots and leaving behind you a long chain of
footprints.
Just one year, day for day, after he had taken that young lunatic to
the station, Henry had gone out for his walk and stopped for a long
time before some old stumps, to count the concentric rings that marked
their age. He liked to know how old his friends the trees were, even
when they were no more. Was it there he caught his cold, in spite of
his overcoat? No one will ever know. That same day, as the day before
had been the anniversary of John Brown’s death, he was talking about
the old man with two fellows who maintained that he had no right to
risk his life. But how about Jesus then? Would he have hesitated if
he had foreseen Calvary? That is what people always say when a man
has made such a simple sacrifice of his life.... But this evil cough
persisted. Henry had certainly made a mistake in paying no attention
to his bronchitis and going off to deliver a promised lecture in the
neighbourhood. He was taking some care of himself, but without any
great results. There was nothing to do but to let the illness wear
itself out. He had had bad times before and pulled through.
Henry had never been a colossus. In his youth he had had to interrupt
his studies at Harvard for a year because of his health; since then it
had been toughened by the open air of his great farm but it had always
been liable to relapses. A serious attack of bronchitis had kept him
for weeks at home when he was twenty-four. Then, at the time of the
hermitage, he had received a kick from a horse which stretched him on
the earth, and he had felt the effects of this in his chest for years.
His frame had held out well, however, and whenever he needed to be
repaired, well, the cabinet-maker had plenty of odds and ends of wood
in a corner of his workshop.
Even as an invalid, kept in the house, he was able to profit by his
days and find a good flavour in life. But now and then, especially at
the hour when he ought to be setting out for his walk, it was all he
could do to resist a flood of black thoughts as he dreamed of the daily
appointments he was missing again. At such moments as these, sunk in
a chair or flattening his nose against the window, he was a very sad
little soul whose life had been turned into prose and who, in a fit of
depression, could easily understand how, in some circumstances, Tom,
Dick or Harry would commit suicide. When that accursed frame won’t go
any more, what are we good for, great gods! He would have liked to pull
down the blinds so that the daylight could not offend him any more
with its sneering remarks and slumber away the hours waiting for the
end like a mortally wounded animal that has resigned itself. But these
moments quickly passed, for if the daylight defied him, his guest, the
imagination, marched in and defied the daylight in turn; it had plenty
of ways of making game of that blockhead. And then he had sometimes
undergone those phases when, though he was not actually ill and was
even out for adventure, nothing spoke to him in the spectacle that had
always had such a powerful attraction for his senses; the dulled body
remained cold and refused to touch the offered nourishment. Inspiration
deserted him, as if his friend found the lodging decidedly too narrow,
as if this frame were too puny for him to hang his pictures there.
As he approached his fortieth year this discord had taken the
proportions of a long-standing quarrel. Since the spring of 1855,
Henry had been feeling rather limp without knowing exactly why. A
great languor spread through him, condemning him to inactivity as he
awaited the end of the crisis. Spoiled were the beautiful plans he had
cherished for this summer, a new trip to the Maine woods. He was good
for nothing but to drag his reluctant carcass along under the elms
of the village, like an invalid. The excursion he had determined to
attempt, in July, to Cape Cod, had not remedied this strange weakness
to any great extent; he had his ups and downs but always the same
debility in the end. Autumn wandered by. And then, towards the end of
the year, the strength came back to his legs and the spirit returned to
the soul of a powerless wretch; perhaps the arrival of the magnificent
Oriental books sent by his friend “Cholmley” had something to do with
it. So he could go out this winter and not lose all his pleasure.
When the first fine days came, Henry could not pretend that he was
absolutely fit for a long excursion, but there was no doubt that spring
had come back to his limbs as well as to the world, and he was seized
with a sudden hunger for the open, for work, for adventures, the more
he felt his strength returning--excursions, visits, the trip to New
York, with those two hours spent in Brooklyn face to face with that
mass of ruddy health. And this continued the following summer, when he
went off to revisit the beaches of the Cape and Upper Maine; didn’t he
have to give himself a thorough cleansing for those seasons when he
had been shut up? His fortieth year had just struck. And this year can
give a good sound if the bell is not cracked. Yes, even if one’s oldest
friendship is broken, like a branch that has had to bear too much snow.
You too no doubt have gone off on these adventurous excursions, when
you were young, set out for discovery and slept out of doors with one,
two, three companions. But the cooling of the years has relaxed your
ardour, and the comrades of yesterday are too busy to fritter away
their precious time; you only make journeys now by your own fireside,
or by train, very comfortably, and you put up at the best hotel with
your wife. You have become sedate and sober, sparing of your legs
and your enthusiasm. Your beautiful youth has been left behind you,
loitering in some glade. But this fellow has too generous a heart to
leave such a charming companion on the road; he still wants to go off
on a jaunt with him, even if he himself is past forty. This is just
the age when his presence is most dear. So he carries him off for a
fortnight, in July, 1858, to the White Mountains in New Hampshire,
which he has not seen since the famous week when he went off boating
with his brother.
But to tell the truth, this was not at all the same story. The
suggestion of the journey came from Edward Hoar, the companion of his
last expedition to Maine; and with his friend Edward he had to travel
in a hired wagon like a pasha, stop at inns where he was devoured by
flies and put up at tiresome hotels, crowded with people he would much
rather not have seen. The real moment came when, leaving the wagon
behind, they set out with their knapsacks on their backs to explore a
wild ravine on Mount Washington. But then, in leaping over the rocks,
Henry sprained his ankle and was obliged to rest for several days under
the tent in the bottom of the ravine before he was able to take the
trail again. On returning from this expedition, the companions who had
joined them and who had worn their good clothes looked as ragged as
runaway thieves while Henry, who had set out with old clothes suitable
for the road and the season, looked almost dressed up beside them; and
yet it was he, prudent soul, who provided the needle and thread to
repair their rips. He had more liberty and pleasure on his excursion
with William, the following summer, to Monadnoc. Not that William was
always charmed with his old crony who upbraided him when William, tired
to death, felt his head buzzing and wanted to stop. So much the worse
for him: he should have known what to expect when he started out for
discovery with the intrepid Henry. You don’t go to Monadnoc to have the
fidgets. But they had camped five nights on the summit under a fragrant
shelter of spruce branches; Henry had brought his hatchet with him.
Then the whole world vanished out of their minds, including the hotels
with their orchestras and dancing. They were alone with the mountain,
which did not offer the same welcome to strangers as to intimates.
William could growl as much as he pleased because he did not have all
his precious comforts, but Henry was rich enough in enthusiasm to sow
the whole mountain-top with it.
Scarcely had the son regained his old strength when another invalid
took his place in a chair at home; it was the father’s turn not to
feel quite himself. Past seventy now, he had begun to cough, like his
own father, and he fell into a rapid decline, so rapid that since the
middle of the winter of 1859 there remained no great hope of saving
this good father Thoreau who, in spite of all, after the bad luck
that had pursued him at the outset, had succeeded with his pencils
in sketching for his family a kind of existence that was not too
unprosperous. With this excellent father, who was so self-effacing and
who read his newspaper so devotedly and did not contain an ounce of
anything that remotely resembled pride and revolt, his boy may never
have had very much in common so far as aspirations were concerned, but
he loved him dearly. And now, seeing him old and ill and more silent
than ever, less and less able to attend to his business and his garden,
he could not do enough for him. His mother was touched by this; well
as she knew the fund of tenderness that was buried in the heart of
her son--deep enough down to be protected from the frost--she was
continually surprised to see him expressing it to the old man with all
the little shades she would have thought peculiarly feminine. Then,
at the beginning of February, fully conscious, after saying good-bye
to his family (he had only been in bed for a week, and on Sunday he
had been up again for a little while), as modestly as he had lived the
little man quietly went out--as a candle of good wax bids you farewell,
after shining for its hour, with no glitter that fatigues the eyes,
leaving behind it only a fragment of sunken wick. So the circle in the
little house, where once there had been half a dozen, was now reduced
to a mother of seventy-two, who had also had her troubles, and her son
and daughter--for the aunts did not live under the same roof.
Since the last months of his father’s illness, the weight of the
business that kept the family alive had fallen on Henry. He assumed
it without any discussion, since from now on they had only one man in
the family to count upon. An annual income of $1200 to $1500 was not to
be found in a blackbird’s nest. Sophia, his sister, took charge of the
book-keeping and the correspondence, but he had the work of overseeing
the mill at Acton, where Warren Miles did the grinding for the Thoreau
concern, together with the packing and boxing in the workshop adjoining
the house. The plumbago was ground so fine at the mill that, in spite
of every care, it leaked from the workshop into the house, where they
breathed it in every room; you might not have noticed it perhaps, but
your lungs, like a miller’s, had to get used to it and put up with it.
Perhaps too the manual labour amounted to less than it had been in
the days of the pencil-making, but Henry had to devote himself to the
routine of the business and be on hand. And so during the whole year
when his father died he was scarcely able to go out; to steal a moment,
to escape and go huckleberrying was a rare victory. And this caused him
even more suffering than the plumbago caused his lungs. With his always
absorbing personal occupations, the tasks in the workshop composed a
very full existence. Never had the days appeared so short, so precious.
His friends must not insist upon his writing to them often.
* * * * *
So Henry carried into the new year this infernal cough that would not
hear of the desires of a rambler who wanted to breathe the fragrance
of winter in his own haunts, on the Cliffs skirting the meadows where
the flocks of crows were lighting. But why worry? With the fine days
all the good things would return. His spirits remained, shut up as he
was, his spirits and his taste for a good, solid book that warmed his
heart. There was nothing to do, in his confinement, but to recall, by
noting it in his Journal, with what skill, what astounding celerity,
the squirrel attacks a pine-cone, crunching the seeds, holding it
between his paws upside down, turning it over like a top as he tears
off the scales where they are soft and nibbles at their base: the vivid
recollection was enough for one who kept coughing to make him feel once
more that he had the soul of a wood-sprite.
The winter came quickly to a close. The prisoner profited by every
afternoon when the air was less harsh to make an expedition to the
post-office. Great was his desire to go and tell his friends and
acquaintances in the swamps that a cheerful soul who was doing penance
for sins of which he was unaware had not forgotten them, in spite of
appearances, and was only waiting for the sky to brighten to resume his
walks. At the end of February the bluebirds were already spreading the
good news along the roads. He had heard them, one fine day, on his way
to old Minot’s who was now quite alone with his eighty years in the
little house on the hillside, for his old companion, his sister Mary,
had just died of pneumonia. But Henry could not walk far without having
to sit down on the first stump he came to. He had difficulty now in
keeping warm. At the end of March the snow fell in such abundance that
the trains could not run any more; and it had driven so since yesterday
that this morning one side of the houses was covered with a white
mattress that choked the windows; the people were almost prisoners
behind their own doors. Just the time, when he couldn’t think of
stepping outside, to finish that letter to Ricketson he had begun: let
his thought at least escape to New Bedford and the fishing-boats, since
it was utterly impossible for him to put on his best pair of boots and
go and spend a Sunday with his friends. The other day, Blake, with a
companion, arrived in Concord, where they spent the night; they had
walked from Worcester and went back the same way, the lucky devils....
William dropped in to see the prisoner and would have liked so much to
be able to pull him through this tight place. Since his strength was
not coming back, in spite of all the little strolls they took together,
stopping constantly (it was no longer the intrepid Henry who dragged
William on), why not try a change of air, a long journey? William
had lived in the West and extolled its tonic quality; this would be
a thousand times better than the climate of the West Indies which
the doctor recommended. They could set out together for two or three
months. You’ll see, Henry, what a gay blade you will be when you come
back.
Henry agreed, not that he had any particular desire for such a grand
tour as that, but because he had a very particular desire to be a man
again, to lose that perpetual cough, lose it far, far away, so that it
would never find its way back. Let’s go. Then, at the last moment--from
caprice or lack of money--William changed his mind; and Henry, who now
wanted to go, had to find another travelling companion. A son of Horace
Mann, who was also called Horace Mann and had dedicated himself to the
natural sciences, offered to join him. He was a very sober young fellow
and not much of a talker; he didn’t have a particle of that liveliness
of William’s which would have been such a great resource in stirring up
a tottering companion.
The itinerary was drawn up and the date of departure fixed for the
middle of May. They were going to make several stops _en route_,
for the veteran walker no longer felt that he had the strength to
accomplish in one stage such a journey as this to Saint Paul in
Minnesota, the land of wheat. The two travellers set out, reached
Niagara, the first stage, then Detroit, Chicago, and finally East
Dubuque on the Mississippi, which they ascended by boat for two
days between the high bluffs of the river to Saint Paul, where they
found one of the Thatcher cousins from Bangor. This was the main
stopping-place. They stayed there three weeks, in the course of which
Henry went on an expedition with a naturalist he had met; he made a new
acquaintance, the prairie squirrel, an odd little customer with his
cope of six light and dark stripes, feet like a marmot’s and an air
that was anything but shy, sitting bolt upright before his burrow. Then
they embarked on the Mississippi as far as Redwood, where there was a
Sioux Agency; there were also said to be buffalo in these regions, but
they failed to catch a glimpse of one. It was the annual pay-day, and
the Indians had come in on their ponies; they offered the travellers a
performance of dancing and music and feasted on an ox. Not bad; but all
this was a little stagey and not worth an hour of Joe Polis’s company.
On the return, a stop of a few days at Red Wing on the Mississippi;
Henry wrote “Concord” on the envelopes instead of decorating his
letter-paper with these two dear syllables. The ray no longer shone
from the centre; no, the ray turned back towards the centre. And then,
by railroad or boat, Prairie du Chien, Milwaukee, Mackinaw, with
another stop. It was July, but it was rather cold, and a man who had
become shivery appreciated the chimney-corner in the hotel. At last
Toronto, the long sail across blue Ontario, the Thousand Islands, the
Saint Lawrence and, stop of stops, old Concord at the end of the long,
long railroad. Henry was tired.
It was very fine, assuredly, the Mississippi, the prairie, and all
those images he had seen filing past. All the same, he had taken few
notes on the way, and they were dry and often very trivial; the points
of interest were dispersed over such a vast distance and unrolled
so quickly that he had hardly had the time to absorb them. And then
his senses no longer took hold of things. This journey had nothing
in common with the other beautiful journeys, when he had carried his
belongings in a handkerchief tied by the four corners; there was the
wearisomeness of the hotels and the cars, not to speak of those vile
medicines the invalid had taken along in his bag. Henry’s hope in this
air-cure had not been great when he started; and in fact, he would have
covered his two thousand miles and spent his hundred and fifty dollars
for nothing if he had not had the joy of seeing at last with his own
eyes the aboriginal crab-apple, that tree which refuses to be grafted,
with its terribly acid fruit, of which he had often dreamed and which
was no longer a myth now that he had touched its branches with his
hands and brought back a flower in his herbarium.
The sad thing was that he had also brought back his cough and his
weakness. The change of air, the movement, the distraction had roused
him a little, invigorated him in appearance, but at bottom it was
still the same story: Helplessness and Co. He was thinner than ever,
he who had so little flesh to lose, and remained incapable of resuming
his occupations. For a long time he had not been able to walk like a
real walker, dig with any vigour in his garden, manage a boat on the
river or even write to any effect, till health seemed to him a human
attribute that was visible only in dreams.
But he still wanted to make the most of the summer and go and see
that good Ricketson. Five days stolen from the wretchedness of his
monotonous existence, five good days of intimacy, sea air and relived
memories were a conquest for a weak man who scarcely had the strength
to go to the post-office any longer. His friend took him out driving
and carried him to a photographer in New Bedford, who turned his camera
on a full-bearded Henry, just back from Minnesota, with a rather
wandering eye. Then Ricketson returned his visit, spent three days at
Concord, where they even went bathing together once in Walden, the
water of which ought to have paid off an old debt of gratitude and
friendship by delivering from his cough the unfortunate fellow who had
so often placed on its banks the figure of a lean but infernally tough
young man.
At Minneapolis Henry had seen some volunteers drilling and a detachment
of others leaving for the front. For war, the call to arms was rising
all about the sick man, who remained sufficiently himself, however, to
keep clear of the collective madness. Insults to the national flag, the
election of Old Abe to the presidency, the whole jingo phraseology was
for him nothing but newspaper talk, and he would not have given two
cents for a hundred yards of it; he did not read the papers any more
willingly, in spite of the upheaval, and the _Tribune_ was much less
timely in his eyes than a book he was reading at the moment: _Six Years
in the Desert of North America_. During the two months of his journey,
he had hardly looked at one of those sheets the people were devouring.
Abolition, yes, that was his cause; but who knew whether the other
interests involved in this war had not brought greater weight to bear
upon it than the question of the four million men to be liberated? You
admire the regiments that march across Manhattan in their brand-new
uniforms--but how about that old ironsides in his seedy trousers and
his old slippers whom they strung up on a gibbet? He did not call the
newspapers and Old Abe and the uniforms to his aid; he simply made a
gift of his own life to the cause, and that was all.
But this was war, nevertheless, that immense, stupid horror from which
you couldn’t withdraw your mind. How could a sick man get better in
this atmosphere of a people who were entirely absorbed in the business
of killing one another?
As the struggle grew graver and graver, as the piles of victims rose,
the reality of the war penetrated him more and more; even in the
village, even for one who despised the newspapers and the bulletins, it
floated into the house, like the plumbago powder. After Bull Run and
the panic, confusion and stupor, Concord was plunged in the blackest
gloom. Henry, who had just come back from Minnesota, seemed full of
interest and even enthusiasm. A good defeat, there would be nothing
like it for putting these people into their right minds again: all
these hare-brained souls who have been assuring you with a smile that
it would be over in the turn of a hand, that they would soon see the
famous warriors of the North coming back again leading by the nose the
little swaggering Southerners.... How this good drubbing would wake
them up!
Then autumn came and this beastly bronchitis had not gone; it seemed
to have settled down to live with him and, finding the house to its
liking, refused to leave. Henry was unwilling to try the experiment of
another climate a second time. And he hadn’t the hundredth of an ounce
of confidence in medicine and doctors.
The only remedy was to make the most of these last beautiful days. His
walks were at an end; every five yards he had to stop. Mr. Hoar, who
was away, had placed his horse and carriage at the sick man’s disposal,
and he made use of them almost every day. September and October were
very pleasant, and Henry drove out in the carriage like a man of
substance, escorted by Mr. Hoar’s dog preceding his friend the horse.
These drives brought back his appetite and a semblance of strength.
He made a trip to the causeway, his old boulevard; he noticed there
the curious hatchings which the storm of the preceding night had made
by whipping the sand of the road. Often Sophia accompanied him, and
for her he did the honours of some of his favourite haunts. Together
they went and spent an hour at Walden one inviting September afternoon;
while his sister sat down to make a sketch, Henry very gently picked
some wild grapes that were growing on the edge of the pond. These wild
grapes that he picked and ate, for the last time perhaps before the
great winter buried everything, were not as sour as one might have
supposed. And this little trip of the brother and sister to Walden, in
the ripeness of September, had itself the taste of grapes.
Soon the cold spread over the earth, and the dampness: it was no longer
possible for such a fragile body to brave the open air. Henry accepted
this humiliation which his body inflicted on him. This body, of which
he had demanded so much, would have no more of it and turned a deaf
ear. It had reached its limit.
Too long had the master expected it to be a thing of steel and obedient
to him, as a sharp plane eats its way jerkily into a piece of tough
wood. He had always treated it without consideration as a bond-servant
that had to march at his beck and call and be silent. Nothing was
too hard for this unhappy retainer: dragging immense logs out of the
river, clambering up trees, remaining for hours buried in the snow or
in the mud of a swamp, climbing the steepest mountain-sides without
resting, sleeping out of doors in the thinnest of clothes, enduring
hunger without relaxing its muscular effort, leaving behind it all
the walkers, climbers, skaters and surveyors in Christendom. It even
seemed as if the master were wreaking his spite on it a little, as if
the overseer took a perverse pleasure in overstraining the strength
of his negro, without tolerating the slightest complaint from him. He
had trained him to make up for the massive strength that his narrow
frame rendered impossible by an incomparable dexterity, by the strength
beyond strength that says “I will” and does it. The drudge had never
demurred: at most, on two or three occasions, it had stopped for breath
in spite of all gee-ups and blows of the whip, like a cart-horse that
comes to a halt, determined not to take another step. But then its whim
would pass and the animal would set off again, resigned to its tasks
like the submissive old servant that it was. Sometimes, as you saw it
working itself to death, you were stirred to an immense feeling of pity
for its lot. But who could make a tyrant like that listen to reason!
Now at last the body no longer wearied with reproaches the master who
had persecuted it with his demands. It was foundering, it was leaving
him, without a complaint, without any bitterness at having had so
few holidays. You must get yourself out of your fix as best you can,
master, and good luck to you. It was going away very quietly, young in
years but spent with fatigue, to the bourne of workers that can work no
more. And as it went, with little breathless steps, it was going to pay
the toll-gatherer a debt of its master. John and Helen had paid it very
early, that sum owed by the line of Thoreaus in America, though the
father, never very brilliant in his business, had not settled it till
seventy years had passed. Sometimes Henry had felt so happy that he had
wondered if some day the debt would not have to be settled for good and
all. Well, pay it, my servant, since the debt is due, and make an end
of it.
What is the use of complaining when an old servant leaves you, even if
you are unable to replace him? Henry did not lament over his failing
body. As he had endured without frowning the sunlight that had roasted
his bare arms and the cold that had nibbled his fingers and toes, why
not endure this lethargy with the same equanimity? You never heard
him speak of what he had parted from and left down there without news
of himself, his friends the trees, the ponds, the little coves of the
river, his boat. All these things lay as if in a corner, wrapped up
in the silk of a great reserve. The invalid slept now on the ground
floor, in the parlour opening on Main Street; through the open door he
could see in a corner of the dining-room the garden of green plants
that Sophia lovingly cared for. His good friends would drop in for a
little chat and bring him the scents of the out-of-doors. Sometimes
they read a deep sadness in his emaciated features, for a child-man
who had gone out every day could not help feeling a little dismal to
be lolling here in a chair while others were taking part in the play.
His shoulders drooped more and more, as if they were melting, his lean
body wasted away, his bony nose shrank, there was a little vagueness
in the big eyes. But Sanborn dropped in, or William, or Alcott, and
they gossiped as gaily as in old times--better than ever now that
gossiping had become the sole form of activity and companionship that
was permitted him. An invalid does not speak of his illness, since it
is understood. One doesn’t keep repeating what is plain enough; when it
rains all day, are you one of those people who are perpetually saying
that the weather is beastly? Just once, standing by the window, he said
to William: “I cannot see on the outside at all. We thought ourselves
great philosophers in those wet days when he used to go and sit down by
the wall-sides.” And as William, who had lost his walking companion,
was down in the dumps, the prisoner continued: “It is better some
things should end.” One didn’t feel grief in Henry’s company. One left
him with the impression that life goes on and that a man can easily
attach an exaggerated importance to his own disappearance.
And isn’t existence still beautiful when you can read, write, dream?
Once Henry would have thought that if he had been deprived of his life
in the open it would not have been life any longer. What a mistake! See
how well you can get along without your body. Another discovery. Go and
take your holiday, my body, if you can’t hold out any longer; I shall
go on my way alone. The mind can get along perfectly well without its
servant.
Henry made haste to place some of his papers in order and put one or
two of his projects on foot; he worked on his manuscripts whenever his
strength permitted him to do so. This was the heart of his life now,
since he could no longer cling to branches to reach a mountain-top.
He had not learned to indulge himself; on the contrary, he was harder
than ever on himself and more punctilious. You have to dust every
corner with the greatest care when you don’t know what great personage
you are going to receive. Three years before the _Atlantic Monthly_
had published one of his essays and mutilated it, and the author had
instantly demanded the rest of his manuscript back again, for he was
unwilling to leave it in the hands of such vandals. Now the review,
under a new editor, asked him to contribute again. He could give them
such pieces as _Walking_ and _Wild Apples_, in which he had put as much
of himself as words were able to contain. It was on these especially
that he was working. He also wanted to complete his pages on the Maine
Woods, of which the two first parts had already been published,
so that they might form a whole. If he could only leave behind him
something besides fragments, apart from those two still-born books....
These were great plans for a man whose strength was ebbing, but the
will to carry them out as well as he could gave a singular value to
the rather insipid scrap of life that was melting in his mouth like a
gumdrop.
In the warmth of the rooms, sitting in his rocking-chair, the prisoner
dreamed--for his mind in the breakdown of his body remained quite
clear--dreamed, as he watched the cat playing or the plants in the
dining-room that accepted their imprisonment with all that greenness.
He dreamed of many things, things behind and things before him.
Regrets, old Henry, under that calm surface? Why? When forty years of a
full life have left you with this pleasant taste.... What better taste
could life leave in the mouth of one who is about to quit it? The taste
of a shop, of cosmetics, of rare roast beef, of incense, of loving
lips, of rum, of medicine, of an old book, of a mother’s tenderness?
For him, as he thought it over, it had the taste of huckleberries.
Regrets would have been inconsistent with this feeling that he had
spent his existence well. To have preserved the brightness of that
marvellous gift. Not to have allowed it to tarnish. Not to have let it
grow mouldy. Not to have spoilt it. To have remained an artist who,
behind his varied occupations, behind his apparent idleness, behind
his very savagery, had firmly practised an art, trained himself in it,
perfected it unceasingly. Was not that worth the sacrifice of some of
the little things to which men seem to cling so desperately? One cannot
have everything, and as he reckoned it all up he did not repent his
choice. He saw especially what advantages he had had. Certainly they
were very appreciable. For instance, in remaining a bachelor, had he
not escaped the drudgery that usually falls to newly-married couples
in the country? He had not been a hog-reeve, charged by the town with
running after wandering pigs that go about grubbing in the fields of
honest farmers. But during this time he had been able to run after a
good many other animals....
Henry weighs the results of an experiment that is finished and finds
them of sterling quality. See, you can turn them over in your hand;
there is nothing unsubstantial about them. To have remained poor. To
have left to others who care for such things the burden of possessions
in order to savour the free pleasure of the world. Never to have been
tempted to sacrifice for a little ease the most succulent part of life,
like those who reach their end without knowing that they have lived.
Yes, to have been this fool who is handling now the returns of wisdom:
how does the reckoning strike you? And not to be any the prouder
because of it. Not even to offer yourself as an example for other
people’s children. To have succeeded in not being for a moment one of
the people who count. Not even a failure. Absolutely nothing at all,
at the age of forty-five. No more a man of letters than a shopkeeper.
Simply H. D. T. A man whose sole desire has been to live, who has
looked forward to nothing but the satisfaction of being alive. To have
dared to live against the grain of one’s whole merchant line and to
find oneself at the end so comfortable. In short, _to have succeeded
in one’s business_, and with such a tiny capital.... Isn’t that luck,
isn’t it almost fantastic? Is it not as if, from the paradise of
merchants above, the sailor of Saint-Helier who made his money in a
shop on Long Wharf were sending you his grand-paternal congratulations?
(We accept them, grandfather, you who are recalled to the memory of
your descendants in this germ you have left them with your blood.)
There are some people who have no right to die, because they have never
lived; but Henry fancies that he deserves it, really deserves this
reward and this proof.
In a box within reach of the hand of the dreamer, a box that he had
carpentered himself, the silent notebooks confirm him. There they are,
thirty or forty irrefutable witnesses. Whoever wishes to question them
will hear convincing words.
They contain the biography of a man. Through the jungle of their
thousands and thousands of pages, paths wander in every direction
leading towards other perspectives than a pond where you look at
yourself. They enclose all the wildness of the brush, the swamps,
meadows, running waters that a Saunterer can trace again and again
without coming to the end of them--with vistas over the sea and over
the hills and beyond. From the country of the Rising Sun to the country
of the Setting Sun the whole space is filled with surprises that will
invite him to pause. He will find there fruits to refresh him on the
way--inspirations at many a turning of the path--guide-posts leading
him to precious discoveries--if only the discovery of himself. And
as he walks along he will stoop down from time to time to pick up an
arrow-head, dropped there as if on purpose; he will soon have a whole
pile of flint-flakes in a corner of his attic. This jungle is a present
which the mysterious Henry in his turn wishes to make, a surprise for
his own kindred. Of all he has received he has kept nothing back. It
was given him in trust, it seems. Henry has never believed in private
property; if he has seemed to be collecting and treasuring things
during his lifetime, it has always been with this legacy in view,
always to enrich the common good.
Especially he owes something to his own parish. To this little town
with its church-tower which has regarded him as a ne’er-do-well he will
show how generous he can be. It is a beautiful thing, a church-tower,
so beautiful that it hides the universe from many of the village folk
who creep confusedly in its shadow. It would never occur to them to use
it as an antenna, set up there to catch communications from the larger
world. A church-tower is a beautiful tower that does not merely sound
at church-time. The tower has a soul that speaks in its own language
to the souls of men and sings because it is beautiful to be a tower
stirred by the messenger winds. When this Concord with its woods and
waters and dewy fields grouped about the tower vibrates and dances with
joy at the great news come from below the horizon and falling from the
tower, the spirit of the tower becomes the master-spirit of time and
space. The bell sounds for the world; it has a sound that is caught
from afar. Yes, the bell of the parish ought to be of a rare metal
when, in these notebooks here, its vibration extends to the remotest
village where men dream in the shadow of their own church-towers: it is
as if it were the voice of their own wonder, their own revolt and their
own love of life....
The dreamer does not weigh very much as he sits there in his
rocking-chair. But all this is so evident, so plain, so full of comfort
that even if he is torn by this cough he can rock very happily in his
chair and regard himself with a certain detachment in his decay as if
he were contemplating a tree that has been stripped of its leaves or as
if he were someone else than himself.
So the winter flows by for a man whose voice is dying, is nothing
now but a murmur (those rolling r’s of old are only a memory now).
To finish the year he has had pleurisy, and he has scarcely been out
since November. Even the post-office has faded away in the withdrawal
of the old world. What remains of Henry is buried in his manuscripts.
The spirit is bent upon proving that, without this miserable servant
who has given it the slip, it can carry on just the same, for a man
who has been dogged so long does not so easily give up his old delight
in contradiction. As for living at this slackened pace, it is, truth
to tell, hardly worth the trouble; his only regret is for those two
women, for whom his departure is perhaps going to make things rather
difficult. But aside from this, it doesn’t mean the end of the world
because a fellow named Henry is going away. You might as well tell us
that the lilacs and the bluebirds are not coming back with the spring.
Rubbish!... See, there it is already. That comrade is quite capable of
getting along without an invalid who once would have run to meet it,
hailing it joyously from afar even before he had seen it. And then, for
a man who is stealing away at forty-five with his fortune made, what a
good thing it is to be thus escaping extreme old age, when you grow fat
if you don’t ridiculously shrivel. Say what you like, Henry has surely
been a lucky dog all along the line.
From behind the parlour window that comprises his universe, he sees the
children passing on their way to school. Many of them are comrades who
have indefeasible rights over the heart of their old friend. When they
do not come in to greet him as they pass, he complains that they are
not exercising these rights, a custom that is so sweet to him. Since
he cannot go huckleberrying with them any more, they should come and
tell their old friend what they are thinking of him in the outskirts of
Concord, among the little people whose habits the children know. It is
well known, however, that behind this window lies a prisoner whose soul
is hungry for this love that is silent because it prefers to remain
anonymous. It is known, for people stop in to see him whose charitable
words, alas, are so far from being as precious as the simple presence
of three little scraps just out of school. To-day it is the Rev. Mr.
Reynolds, a neighbour, who is astonished to find a sick man working so
assiduously. “You know,” Henry explains, “it’s respectable to leave an
estate to one’s friends.” The following day it is that blockhead who
thinks it is his duty to say to you by way of consolation: “Well, Mr.
Thoreau, we must all go.” To him this departing soul replies: “When I
was a very little boy, I learned that I must die.... So of course I am
not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me.” Or it
is Sam, the old innkeeper, still jailor and tax-collector, and on his
way to becoming one of the bigwigs of Concord, who does not find him
greatly changed since the night when he had him as a boarder; he is as
cool as ever and almost contemptuous in his calm strength. This time it
is not the poll-tax the collector has come for but the ground-tax, and
to-day he will not meet with a “no.” The tax-payer knows perfectly well
what he owes, he has made his provisions. He has even jotted down on a
paper the names of friends to whom he wishes to have one of his books
or some knick-knack given in memory of their mad Henry. To William, the
Chronicles of Froissart, to Eddy, Waldo’s son, his microscope, and the
shells to his sister Edith. Good Aunt Louisa will receive the sum of
$50, which will please her. There will still be enough for the other
gifts. It is as if the purse of a poor dying man had a double bottom.
In the street an organ begins to grind out an old air that suddenly
calls up the fragrance of his childhood, like a bouquet that has been
placed suddenly under his nose. His illness has not obliterated Henry’s
sense of smell. What neither suffering nor a breach of faith nor a
misunderstanding has ever been able to do this hackneyed air ground
out by a street-organ accomplishes in an instant. He is torn asunder.
All the old repressed tenderness, compelled to remain rigid for so
long, makes wild leaps in his heart that has such a short time to beat,
throws itself against the bars of its cage, tries to escape, poor
thing, get out into the free air, before it is extinguished. Tears bead
these eyes that have so rarely wept, save under the lash of the winter
wind. “Give him some money! Give him some money!”
In a room where once it would have seemed pure madness to think of
living permanently, a prisoner ends by discovering between four walls
interests enough to create a very good imitation of existence. Insomnia
is a nuisance, but he prefers it to the drugs that would have brought
him sleep. When he slips off, his slumber is engarlanded with fantastic
dreams, as if the doors of an unknown world were opening to enchant
him, in compensation for all he has had to leave. When he was in good
health, he had often enough had dreams at night, very strange ones, but
now they load him with favours, lavish attentions upon him, as if they
could not devise enough ways of amusing a prisoner. Kindly sleep hangs
in curious festoons about the bed of a sick man who has at last dozed
off. Now it is in his lungs that the railroad labourers are digging a
trench, placing the ties and the rails; the train is going to pass;
look out, you man down there, following the track on foot; don’t be
afraid to flatten yourself against the bank. It is Henry’s lung; you
can observe its curious little caverns and, if you keep a Journal, note
them down. The prisoner tells his dreams to the people who come to
see him, and that is one pleasure more. They remind him of a dream he
used to have as a boy in which at one moment he was rebounding from a
surface as hard as rock which hurt him frightfully and at the next was
lying cosily in a feather bed.
Good dreams, coming so graciously to visit a condemned man, good dreams
not coming with moral counsels but simply in friendship, with beautiful
images for one who has dreamed so often wide-awake, coming when he
is there all alone with his courage and his helplessness before the
certain issue. To receive them more handsomely in his prosaic room, he
asks Sophia to arrange the furniture in such a way that in the light of
the night-lamp the shadows seen from his bed will create on the wall a
kind of phantasmagoria. He would like to conform to the laws of this
strange world which is so comforting to the sick; he wishes that his
bed were in the form of a shell at the bottom of which he could roll
himself up like a voluta, roll himself tighter, much tighter than a
tired spaniel who curls up before the fire after a long winter’s day
of hunting. How much more pleasant to touch than the sheets would be a
sheath of mother-of-pearl!
The daylight, far from interrupting the phantasmagoria, merely
transforms it. Spring has come back, and as Henry can no longer go
out for the first flowers their fragrance comes to him. Just now some
cultivated flowers are addressing him in the name of the whole floral
circle. They are the offering of the gardens of Concord to a gardener
who cannot wield the spade. It is not merely his intimate friends who
stop in and bring them; village people whom Henry does not know at
all send him bouquets, sweetmeats and even game, which might tempt a
man who hasn’t much of an appetite. People whom, when he was well, he
would have dumped into the same sack and powdered with the salt of
his sarcasms return the sarcasms in advance changed into flowers and
delicacies. Henry is stirred as he had been by the organ-grinder’s
tune. Isn’t this bunch of hyacinths an almost terrible pleasure for a
man who is so soon to disappear and finds so many friends who cannot be
kind enough to him? One reason more for going; it is a simple matter
of decency. “I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much
has been done to me ...” is the simple utterance of a stricken heart
which even now would bolt all its locks if certain sacred words that
are forbidden were pronounced before it. And there are all the things
of which he knows nothing.... Can he guess that in Michigan a workman
who does not know him at all except through his writings is making
a beautiful walking-stick for him out of a rare wood, with a silver
head and an inscription, and that another man in Indiana.... But no,
enough, enough; this would send him under the earth at once. A wave of
indulgence has spread into the room with the spring and the flowers.
He must pardon a dear aunt who does not understand the language of
flowers when she asks him, with a very confidential air that is full
of responsibility, if he has made his peace with God, and reply that
this is impossible, dear aunt, since he has never quarreled with that
illustrious personage of antiquity. He must pardon even that pious soul
who speaks to him of another world as familiarly as if he had been
there, replying mildly: “My friend, one world at a time....” He who is
about to dive into the black pond thinks rather of the loon that dived
in Walden, and like the latter he has a mind to fling a mighty laugh of
defiance into the face of this honest soul.
From time to time Sophia writes a letter to his friends at her
brother’s dictation, and she reads to him the letters that arrive--from
unknown persons sometimes. He must not leave unanswered the letter from
that young man in Leedsville who has written such charming things
about the _Week on the Concord_. Just a word to thank him and tell
him that he is getting along well enough, even if he has only a few
months before him. When he does not feel too feeble, Henry continues to
read, jots down a few notes, brushes up his manuscripts. The illness
that consumes him progresses steadily, though he keeps his old calm.
The explorer of Upper Maine was never cooler on the rapids when he
was steering Joe’s canoe. The eye and the hand have not abandoned the
direction on the current that is bearing him on at this moment; if he
capsizes, it will be because the river is obstructed by a whirlpool
from one bank to the other. Most of the time he is silent, like a good
pilot who does not wish to have his attention distracted. But there is
nothing morose in this silence; it is a sort of self-communion, and
so natural. His voice has become so feeble, so feeble, that it cannot
express very much. And his mournful whisper might even becloud the end
of such a beautiful day.
* * * * *
Since seven o’clock in the morning, this Tuesday, the sixth of
May, 1862, a dying man has been turning and turning, as if to free
himself.... Tender hands have had to lift him on his pillow.... One
last time, just after eight o’clock, an old mother, a sister, a good
aunt, gathered about the little cot, raise the narrow frame of a man
who makes a sign for them to lift him still higher, upright, supporting
with the pillows his last more and more feeble breaths ... listening,
as they bend over, to the vague murmur of words in which pass “moose”
... “Indian” ... and the Wanderer is at the end of his journey. Or
perhaps he has departed for some faraway hunt in the footsteps of the
Indian, in the Happy Hunting Ground....
Three days later, a coffin passes, covered with wild May flowers, on
the way to the church. If it contained Henry, it would almost have
realized his wish to live in one of those tool-chests of the Irishmen
who worked on the railroad. But it is so light that it can hardly
contain the body of a man--unless it is his chrysalis.... Perhaps on
this splendid May morning, another Henry has emerged who has not needed
to go out into the air, to raise the lid of the coffin, because he has
practised so many of the tricks and fathomed the art of metamorphosis.
Another Henry than the one who is there, as they say, under the flowers
that his friends have brought--Henry as he was ten years ago, but quite
new, though he wears his old corduroy trousers.
For one chap who knows him better than all the people in the procession
has seen him, mingling with those who are looking on, seen him
chuckling because they are carrying this body to the church. (Though,
after all, if it gives them pleasure ... it is all the same thing to
a chrysalis. Those who once had the best of Henry by paying the tax
for him can have the best of him still. And besides, Waldo, who was a
churchman, thinks so much of these things....) But why the devil didn’t
they make the coffin of good, dry driftwood? Isn’t a man worth as much
as all the sacred books of the East? Floating in a wooden shell, a
vagabond might have gone on voyaging so comfortably.... The dull souls!
Then the same fellow has seen him resuming his grave air as he listens
to the fine words pronounced over the coffin and filtering through the
field flowers strewn over it. And when the coffin finally comes out
of the church, he has seen him resolutely follow it, as if it were
journeying towards a familiar spot and one where he also wished to go.
About the grave it is not the spring daylight nor the company nor the
sad faces of these women that seem to stir this other brand-new Henry.
What attracts him is this open earth, exposed by a fellow-digger. This
beautiful earth. This good earth. It beckons to him. It surely has
something to confide to him.
He wants to lie down in the earth, deep in the earth, so that it may
clasp him and whisper in his ear its old secret. This must be something
astonishing.
He is sure now that the earth alone can speak to him the words he has
been waiting for. The earth alone can feel the fervour with which he
thinks of the beautiful life that might open like this gaping soil--of
the great rambles he would take, with a miraculous knapsack on his
back, drunk with adventure--of the page that he would write on his
return, a page too rich for any magazine to publish it--of the friends
from whom no misunderstanding would ever, ever, separate him any more
(friendship, friendship, he would taste it now, for the husk would be
off at last!)--of the joy of unbosoming himself fully--and of all the
men whom he has loved from afar without ever letting them know and who
would know at last, at last....
How beautiful it would all be! So beautiful that no notebook would ever
be able to contain it, so beautiful that he would have to fling himself
into this trench and carry it with him like a warm thought under the
earth.