Chapter VI (2)

Henry feels more at home with Daniel Ricketson, who invites him to his house at New Bedford, the whaling port. On the first occasion it is mid-winter, and Ricketson, who is a Quaker, is clearing the snow off his front steps and thinking of his visitor who is very late in arriving. Up the carriage road comes someone who looks like a pedlar, in a long overcoat, carrying a little bag and a big umbrella. But it is the expected personage, and he strolls up imperturbably through the friendly snow; he has had no thought of preparing a sensational appearance; they will receive him cheerfully in this disguise as Santa Claus, for it is Christmas Day. The following year Daniel returns the visit. He is a new friend. There are good years for friendship as there are for trees. It even comes to Henry from across the sea in the person of that tall, fair-haired, distinguished-looking young man, the descendant of Anglican bishops, who, on his trip through America, comes to see Emerson who sends him to the Thoreaus’ house, where there is always room for a boarder. Rather an odd fish, this Thomas “Cholmley,” and a little hard to swallow just at first, but charming at bottom under his English patrician’s uniform, fresh from Oriel College. He is just back from New Zealand, where he has had a taste of cattle-raising. They go off on several rambles together about Concord; with William to make up a trio, they set out for the conquest of that old solitary Wachusett. Henry has very little use for these over-civilized young blades who respectfully ask him to take them along on his walks; but he has made an exception of this tall, fair-haired fellow who has been to New Zealand. Some day he must take him to New Bedford.

There, at least, there is no constraint. On the very threshold he shakes off his gloom, the melancholy of the northern pine; he is himself, he is a child. In this congenial atmosphere he is ready for any joke, and he laughs and sings. He doesn’t quite catch the tune, but who cares?--it sounds just as well. The bathing is excellent and they get up a boating-party. One afternoon--is it the venerable Alcott’s presence that excites him?--when Mrs. Ricketson is at the piano, the northern pine, seized with a mad gaiety, actually begins to execute a Zulu dance around the room, taking pains to tread on the toes of Alcott who smilingly watches his good colleague’s extravagant behaviour. If that blessed Blake were only in a corner of the parlour too, on this occasion, ready for a little nip from the dancer’s boots! It would enlighten him better than the longest letter on the nature of Henry’s philosophy. Henry’s face is as long as a night-cap when he is with ceremonious people who bore him. He writes deep, serious things because he is not interested solely in trifles. And there he is, forever pigeon-holed as the most dismal of souls. They haven’t seen him, brimming over with nonsense, acting a pantomime with his own intimate friends; they have never heard him singing at the top of his lungs alone in the woods or surprised him with the children doing some marvellous trick. No, he is and he will remain the morose ascetic who went off into the woods one day, full of hatred for humanity, and pounded out his black thoughts in a rough-hewn mortar. Rubbish!... Let them talk, Henry, while you go on dancing about the room. And look out for your toes, Alcott!

One day, towards the end of July, 1850, Henry sets out hurriedly on a strange journey. He is not going to spend Sunday this time with a friend who is waiting for him; he has to find the body of a friend who has died. Poor Margaret Fuller, whom he had never known well but who recalled to him the days of the _Dial_, was returning from Italy, married now and a mother, on a ship that had gone ashore in a storm on Fire Island. She was one of the victims, after having watched death approaching for twelve hours till a mightier wave delivered her with her child and her husband. Henry has been commissioned by all the Concord friends--Margaret was William’s sister-in-law--to search the scene of the shipwreck and try to recover her pitiful remains and her belongings. He scours the beach, questions everybody, pursues his inquiries. Plunderers of the wreck have been there before him. At first nothing is found but a few papers, some love-letters and the little body of Nino.... Then, eight days after the shipwreck, Henry, who has got his direction from a lighthouse-keeper, finds on a lonely beach the shapeless remains of a body, ravaged by the rough jaws of the sea--a few bones with a little flesh still adhering to them....

Concord enfolds a man very tenderly in the arms of its river and woods when he comes back with roughened skin from such trips as these. But when you are at once a stay-at-home and a nomad, there are few holidays to be compared to a long expedition when your confounded circumstances permit you to think of such a thing. And nothing could be happier than the happiness of the preliminaries when you are making your plans and studying your itinerary, inspecting your knapsack and your boots, and reading the books about the country you are going to explore. Don’t talk about recreation or satisfying some asinine taste for the picturesque by following the footsteps of other travellers. Henry sets out from his village to reconnoitre, to get light on some very important matters and bring back something to fill up his chests there in the garret. These are his campaigns.

There is that crooked beak, shaped like a fishhook, which Massachusetts thrusts out into the sea--perhaps in an attempt to catch that big greedy fish Long Island, if the latter, tired of sniffing the unprofitable metropolis, should decide some day to turn to the North for its food. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to go and see how the wind blows there and have a look at the old sea-dogs that incrust it like shell-fish? Cape Cod. A long tongue of land curving out like a breakwater into the open Atlantic--an immense organ from which the ocean draws its grandest tones.

This year, with his book out at last, Henry can give himself a little extra treat. William has decided to come too. They set out together at the beginning of October (they are obliged to take the train so as not to spend an eternity on the way) and stumble straight into a shipwreck at Cohasset. The train is crowded with Irishmen who are on their way to identify the bodies--from the beach to the church the farm-wagons come and go, some of them carrying the corpses, others the sea-weed thrown up by the storm. Immigrants from Galway in Ireland, and here they are, livid under their white sheets, arriving, feet first, in the land of their hopes. The flag of the shipwrecked vessel is drying there on the rocks with pebbles on its four corners, still keeping its colours--not dead like the Irish lads. The captain and the other survivors will lead the funeral procession.... At the base of the fishhook they leave the train and take the stage as far as Orleans, where the tongue of land grows so thin: it is nothing but a sandbar sixty-five miles long by a few miles in width. How good-natured the people in the stage are! Simple and natural as if--O joy!--no blessed social categories existed in their astonishing country and they were all old acquaintances. Does the nearness of the ocean teach people the art of living?

It rains and blows the next day, when they start out on foot. Never mind, they are not going to wait for it to clear. They walk along the shore; the umbrella shields them and the wind drives them on. They are not loaded down like those two little Italians who are walking towards Provincetown with their organs on their backs. It is an entirely new landscape for the lads from Concord. No trees. Here and there a cottage with a red roof. Octagonal windmills, such as they have never seen except in pictures. In the fields heaps of clam-shells; the pigs, they say, are fattened on the clams, those marine acorns. And see there, those stunted apple-trees sheltered in a hollow, those little old toy-like trees from which a child could pick the apples by hand. It would be difficult to creep your way under them, the branches are so low and shrubby. The little Cape Cod horses are as amusing as goats. You great Concord farmers, if you could measure the scantness of the land the people cultivate here--about as much as a miser could hold in his palm! But it yields a little rather meagre corn and the vegetables in the tiny gardens actually seem to be thriving. This is the country of the sea.

The best thing is to leave the road and march along to this roar that you hear uninterruptedly on the right. The companions have come here not to follow a road but to enjoy the ocean. They cut across the fields in the direction of the three Nauset Lights. Then, in the wind and rain, they are lost in an absolutely bare plain, shut in by fog. The smallest object appears immense in this desert and as if suspended between sky and sand. It is just the way one should see this interminable plain. Henry feels so happy that he could sing. He is going to try to keep clear of the villages up to the very end of the Cape so as not to break the powerful charm. At the end of this vast plain, and after crossing a stretch of upland covered with shrub-oak and beech-grass and a strip of bare sand, they suddenly find themselves at the top of a Bluff: at their feet lies everything they have come to seek--the beach and the Atlantic. The ocean is dark under a stormy sky--as Atlantic as possible. Those white lines of foam, some distance out, reveal the sandbars. And beyond that nothing ... nothing but Europe, and faraway Jersey ... so people say. It is too beautiful here for you to have any desire to go over and see it. From this point on the two umbrellas set out to skirt the shore, as close to the water as possible where the sand is hardest.

Twenty-five good miles lie before them to the tip. As they sail along under the umbrellas that shelter and aid them, with the wind at their backs, the walk side by side becomes glorious. Two happy souls under their whalebone turtle-shells travel along so close to the water’s edge that every now and then they have to leap quickly aside to escape a great wave that has watched them from afar and flung itself upon them: perhaps it is the umbrellas that have provoked it into lashing them with its kelp-weed tails. And when you have played with the waves it is a delight to scramble up the sandbank that forms the back-bone of the Cape, so as to have a wider view of the ocean and look off into the distance and over to the left, to the desert of sand. The rolling country yonder, covered with autumn-tinted shrubbery, permits them at intervals a glimpse of the bay. Walking now on the ridge, straddling the Cape, now on the fine sand--there are no rocks to break the wonderful monotony of this shore--the wayfarers take their time, resting now and then; for the sand, soft as it is to their feet, makes walking difficult after a while. Not a sail in sight, for the sea is too heavy; not a soul on the beach. It is as if the ocean preferred to see no one about him when he is roused. Days might pass without your encountering two natives of the country, those plunderers of wrecks with faces hard as a stone, a stone that the sea has rolled from the beginning of time and is ready to go on rolling for as many ages as it chooses.

But they do not ask for any distraction. The enormous spectacle fills the scene. It is better even not to talk amid this continual roar that obliges them to shout; and if they do it is only to thunder some Homeric lines to put themselves in tune with this bass voice. Surprises strew their path, marvellous plants, dragged up from the sunken palaces of the sea, all of which they would like to carry away if they could only keep them alive in their flexibility and their lustre. Henry chews a tip of one of them. The beautiful sea-medusas that strew the beach in their tattered finery are as if struck with consternation not to be swinging any longer, delicate and transparent, in the hollow of the waves: dispossessed princesses whose hearts shrivel on this alien strand. In spite of the noise of the sea they hear the piping of a plover. Suppose they have a little lunch? It is noon, time to settle themselves in a hollow of the bank and eat something, as two good boys should who have gone a long way since breakfast in the inn at Orleans and are famished by the salt air. Some dry sticks, a fire, a superb clam cooked over the sand as the principal dish; the meat is a bit rubbery, but with a cracker and sprinkled with the cries of the sea-gulls it is quite edible and even savoury. And look there, the weather is clearing....

By evening the pilgrims have reached Wellfleet. They must think of shelter for the night. In that little house over there, with the gable pierced with those small irregular windows, there will surely be a corner for two fellows who are not hard to please. No one at home. How about the other? An old woman who has had her eye on these two suspicious-looking individuals fastens her fence-gate, then resolutely goes back into the house. Hm.... We’ll see. Knock, knock. An old man opens the door and asks them with a distrustful air where they have come from and what they want. They explain. Of course we might be almanac-vendors, but no, my friend, we’re not. We’re from the famous Concord where the great battle took place at the time of the Revolution. The old man is eighty-eight, so he was fourteen when that historic event occurred. These pedlars who are not pedlars are too much for him. Well, walk in, since you’ve come from the country of the Revolution. The old woman relieves the strangers of their bundles and their hats, while the grandfather grumbles: “I am all broken down this year. I am under petticoat government here.”

The hospitable family is composed of a daughter who looks as old as her mother, and a brutish-looking, heavy-jawed son who goes out abruptly at the sight of these strangers; there is also a boy of ten. “These women,” the old man says to Henry, “are both of them poor good-for-nothing critturs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-five years ago. She is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not much better.” The good soul is an old oysterman who, since sailing the seas in his young days, has had much intercourse with oysters and the Bible. He likes to gossip and they converse in a friendly way about oysters, surveying and apple-raising. The half-witted son returns and begins to mutter, without lifting his head: “Damn book-pedlars--all the time talking about books. Better do something. Damn ’em. I’ll shoot ’em”.... Whereupon, the old man, assuming an air of authority as if he were used to it, says: “John, go sit down, mind your business. Precious little you’ll do--your bark is worse than your bite.” But the sullen imbecile persists in muttering, goes and sits down at the table, eats up everything that is on it and reaches out for the apples which his mother is paring for her guests’ meal. She draws them away and sends him about his business. There are many of these imbeciles in the villages of Massachusetts.

But it is a pleasure to listen to the old oysterman who relates his recollections in a language as salty as the water that you swallow with an oyster. He well remembers seeing Washington, a man with such a fine bearing! And to show how well the great general sat his horse the old fellow strikes an attitude, straightens his shoulders and bows ceremoniously to right and left, sweeping the absent three-cornered hat with a wide gesture. It is just as you see him in the school-books, but in what picture will the general ever have such a grand air as he has in this little house on Cape Cod, evoked by the mimicry of an old oysterman? After this they all go to bed. The boy, who is in the chimney-corner, takes off his shoes and stockings, and as he has a sore leg they rub it with salve before he goes upstairs. The imbecile takes off his old shoes and follows. Then the old man, removing his shoes in turn, without ceasing to discourse on the miseries of the world, exhibits with pride a pair of calves as plump as a baby’s.

William and Henry retire to their room. Someone behind them draws the bolt and fastens them in. You can’t be too careful. After all, you never know with these clever people who are up to all sorts of tricks.... (Ah, good people, how right you were to distrust two strangers who had dropped from the clouds. Two days later the Provincetown Bank was robbed and the police were looking for two men who must have done the job. Good heavens, to think you might have had those two scoundrels under your roof.... Nothing more prophetic than the instinct of an imbecile who wants to execute them out of hand. Put this in your pipe and smoke it, you sham pedlars, even if you are not the thieves. You have been taken for tinkers or almanac-vendors already--it may be pickpockets next. If you had never left your own hole-in-the-ground, how would you have ever known that you had in you the makings of all these characters?)

The door is unlocked before dawn and Henry runs to the beach to watch the sun come out of the sea. They have breakfast. The old man begins to spin his yarns again, forgetting to eat, and says to his wife, who reminds him of this: “Don’t hurry me; I have lived too long to be hurried”.... Meanwhile, the two comrades breakfast a little gingerly, not being sure of the exact spots on the hearth sprinkled by the old man’s tobacco-juice while the meal was being prepared there. They pay their score and set out. The weather is marvellously clear this morning, swept clean by the wind that howled in the chimney.

They follow the dunes. The tide is coming in. The vessels are skimming like gulls over the ocean; one, a barque, furls her sails and drops anchor a gunshot from the shore. In this miraculous brightness of the ocean how large and strange objects on the sand appear: at a distance a bit of wreckage looks like a cliff. The most absurd little rocking-horse here would have the size of some monstrous steed. And always, under your feet, those gifts of the sea that would go so well in your collection: a wet pebble, gleaming like a jewel, debris, come heaven knows whence, rolled by the waves heaven knows how long, roughly modelled by the ocean, polished or tarnished, a beautiful crab’s shell, a sponge, a five-franc piece, bearing the image of Louis XV the Well-beloved. Henry’s eyes, with their Concord habits, even find an arrow-head, placed there in his honour. They must bathe in that little basin formed by a sandbar, then sit down to dry and watch the coots dancing like corks on the waves or the schools of menhaden, with their back fins projecting two or three inches out of the water. In some patches the sea is as purple as a grape. That sail yonder comes from some port of dreams for which you are homesick even without knowing what it is. It speaks mysteriously to a man, naked in the sun after his bath, who hears the pores of his skin murmuring together how marvellous it is to belong to a body that is freed from its braces and buttons.

It will be best not to stop at Truro but to push on to the Highland Light where they will find comfortable quarters. Indeed the keeper receives them without asking them who they are, receives them, in his simple brick dwelling attached to the white lighthouse, with the generosity of a lonely soul. They climb with him up the winding iron stairway to the lantern when he goes up to light his fifteen oil lamps. (What a job keeping them in order! There are the wicks, the oil that congeals in winter, the reflectors, the windows, and on warm summer nights the moths that glue themselves there by the million, dimming the lights--and yet everything is neat and in apple-pie order in the lantern.) Think what a fine place it would be for a lad with studious tastes who was too poor to feed his own lamp! And what a beautiful inn! There you are, all night, close to the waves, snug in your bed, a part of the lighthouse, yourself a light towards which the lookout-men at sea direct their eyes. Wonderful!

The Cape narrows and is soon nothing but a shrunken tongue of land along which move two insects in holiday spirits. They are approaching the point of the hook. Three or four days along the seashore, tramping in the October wind, and there is Provincetown at last, a mere dot. A compactly built little town, a barking cur, people going about their business--all these things cut a sorry figure before an ocean that swings from one continent to another. The two hundred schooners of the mackerel fleet that lie there in the harbour are like toys scattered on a green carpet. There is a smell of drying fish along the plank sidewalks of the little town, which is engulfed in the fine sand that filters into everything, into your shoes, into the houses. To bid farewell to the Cape they push on across the deserted region to the North of the port. The wind from the open sea stings and caresses them and makes their skin smart. The whole burden of the Atlantic comes to die at their feet in the whiteness of the foam and a rumbling as of the end of the world.

It is Sunday. Some sailors are engaged in painting their boat at Provincetown when a tithing-man comes along and tells them they are disturbing the Sabbath. That’s all very well for you, my friend. On Sunday you lounge about the house after church, smoking your pipe with your family, looking at the picture-papers or getting drunk if you like; it’s easy for you to observe the Sabbath without causing any scandal. But from where I sit, peacefully watching the harbour and the sea, I can hear the shouts of a preacher from the meeting-house over there with its windows wide open to the sunlight. (Wouldn’t you think he was a drill-sergeant or a boatswain giving his commands?) Now, tithing-man, why not tell that fellow to stop making a nuisance of himself? Those sailors are not disturbing a soul as they paint their boat, but that fanatic poisons the beautiful Sunday air for everybody.

Monday, the departure. They set off for home by sea, saluted, as they leave the harbour, by some red-shirted men who, from their boats, watch the little steamer passing: a Newfoundland dog, with his paws on the rail of one of the boats, watches them too, watches as a big sailor’s dog knows how to watch. In no time at all the Cape and everything over there behind them is a mere pale beak almost level with the sea, and before they know it they are tying up at Long Wharf between two big boats ... Boston ... the train for Concord. Oh, to get to Concord quickly enough to bring home before they are gone that scent of codfish and oysters and that drone of the sea in the shell at your ear....

It is so beautiful, this desolate coast, so powerfully appealing, this Atlantic solitude, that Henry returns alone to the Cape the following summer and twice later, alone or with William. Cape Cod has become the first colonial possession of an affluent lover of the wilds. But the danger of these long expeditions is that one becomes insatiable. A rich man always wants more. Having gone to the extremities of Massachusetts, to the mountains and the sea, he has taken it into his head to press on to the boundary of the United States, and beyond....

Henry, you are ready to throw your money out of the window. William has agreed to go up to Canada with you, or is he the tempter who has induced you to go? However that may be, the matter is settled between the two accomplices. They are going to take advantage of a special excursion train. It is very disagreeable to travel under such conditions, packed in with those idiotic tourists, but it enables them to go a long way for very little money, and once they are there they can get rid of the other reduced-price gentry soon enough and set out by themselves on a tour of discovery. They will have a week before them.

They leave Concord in the morning, before eight o’clock, and by six in the evening they are on the shore of Lake Champlain, which crosses the frontier ... on the map. For it crosses nothing on the landscape. But is there a single one of these fifteen hundred excursionists who, at this solemn moment of passing from one country into another, is not looking for some mountain-chain, some gulf, some gigantic gate--heaven knows what--to show that here one nation begins and another ends? A frontier, and the face of the earth goes straight on as if it knew nothing about its own political geography? But they begin to hear people speaking in a different language (is that the looked-for gulf?), and already they feel far away from home--on the “foreign soil” of the romances.

More than anything else, Montreal is the church of Notre Dame. A deep cave like that in the heart of a city deserves a visit. It is very still there. The church can hold ten thousand worshippers, but at the moment it seems to contain only three women who are praying, and the latter do not even lift their eyes to look at two fellows who are softly making the tour of the nave with their hats in their hands. A troop of natives come in, countrymen on a visit to town whose first thought is to kneel before the high altar, with the rather awkward movements--as Henry thinks--of cattle preparing to lie down. The glitter of the altars, the candles and the images do not impress him, but he is touched by this ingenuous respect. The silence is good in this cavern. There reigns here a little of the mystery of the deep woods; it is open every day to all comers, a retreat to which you can come and meditate, away from the crowds, and really feel at peace with yourself. If you were condemned for your sins to live in a town like this, you would certainly come to Notre Dame, with the same respect as these good women, to pray in your own fashion between services. If it were not for the priests and their mummery, this Catholic religion would not be a bad thing at all. It has such beautiful shrines for meditation. Even the holy water in the basins would not disturb you very much if, in the minds of the faithful, it were sacred like the water of a fountain dedicated to a goddess. This Roman religion merely needs to be brushed up a little by a pagan. Notre Dame is certainly an astonishing cave.

In the streets, priests and Sisters of Charity. These latter must have been weeping all their lives long to have such scalded-looking eyes; they have the faces of people who have been buried and dug up. They all go about with lowered eyeballs, as if they had made up their minds never to smile again. The sight of them insults the daylight. There are also a great many soldiers about, mounting guard or drilling. Henry wonders of what use all these puppets are. They are probably to amuse the citizens, like a Punch and Judy show. And there are market-women in the square with beautiful apples, pears and peaches for sale. (It is the end of September.) Henry buys some, hazarding a few words of the language of the country. These honest fruit-sellers at least are flesh-and-blood women, and their apples are apples and not church ornaments. And the old French names that he reads in the town have as much flavour as the apples, or as the chronicles of the navigators who set sail from Saint-Malo in their immense old tubs and landed at Tadousac, at the confluence of the Saguenay. Henry has read those chronicles, and they enchant him.

The zigzag fissures there in the rock are Quebec and its climbing streets. And the citadel--and the barracks and the barracks. High up there on the ramparts he perceives from afar a terrible warrior with an immense cocked hat; he wonders if it is the god of war stuck up there like a scarecrow, or if that horrifying puppet with its gun is preparing to destroy the world. These soldiers are the ornament of Quebec; they are set about everywhere to make it clear that the English are energetic people. In the citadel the Highlanders are drilling. They have the graceful, elastic step of mountaineers: strong, healthy young men, condemned to a humiliating and ridiculous occupation that is stupefying them and turning them into automatons in the service of Her Britannic Majesty. Their movements make a sad impression upon a man who stands there, with his old umbrella and his bundle, staring at the soldiers, as if they were a new species whose habits are unknown to him. He is poorly dressed, as his way is when he travels, with a thin, twenty-five-cent palm-leaf hat on his head and a brown linen sack to conceal the raggedness of his coat. The spectator compares himself mentally with that superb officer there who, without his disguise, would probably look just like anybody else. He would almost like to hand him his own duster out of charity, so that he wouldn’t have to look so much like an old bogie.

But he had better climb down again to the town and have a look at the milkmen’s dogs, harnessed to the little carts containing a single immense can, and the market by the water-side, and the old women sitting in the open air behind their vegetables and fruit--and the ferry-boats continually going to and fro with their motley, chattering crowds. The cabmen talking in French to their old hacks remind him of the ancient France that still keeps its aroma here. In this restaurant he has just entered what interests Henry is not the bottles and the glasses on the table but a great map of Canada hanging on the wall. This table is made of mahogany, and it would be a pity to scratch it. The guest spreads out his handkerchief, then climbs up on the table and begins to study the map. When he sets foot on the floor again, without having broken any of the dishes, he has had his meal; the food itself will be merely dessert.

But it is to see the country that he has come to this “foreign soil.” The two friends set out on foot to explore the Falls of Montmorenci. They promise themselves a good deal of pleasure. There may be less uniforms and nuns along the roads. It will be a great experience to see simple human beings.

The peasant women are working in the fields, buxom, healthy-looking creatures with ruddy cheeks under their broad-brimmed hats, and much more agreeable to look at than the natives of the stronger sex. The villages straggle along with their whitewashed houses. Thank goodness, you no longer feel yourselves strangers as you did at Montreal and Quebec. Isn’t it odd? No matter where you wander on the planet, as long as there is a tree of any species, a blade of grass, a glint of running water or a beach where pebbles have been washed up, you are immediately at home; while a score of miles from your own church-tower you have only to set foot on the sidewalk of a town to feel yourself an alien, with all communications cut with the world and your own kindred. A strange business, this “foreign soil.”

Evening falls. They have reached the village of Beauport. It would be much cosier if they could put up with some of the inhabitants. They are in the heart of the Canuck country, where you have to speak the language. Even the little curs bark in a kind of French. Henry courageously knocks at a door, and when they shout “Entrez” from within some fine little phrases emerge, the fruit of his reading since school-days. His accent may not be very good, but often enough the people understand it. The only trouble is that he can make scarcely anything of their voluble replies. And the blunders are very amusing. These honest Canucks are full of good will, but unfortunately they are poor people and have no bed to offer the strangers. So our friends are compelled to enquire in their best pigeon-French: “_Y a-t-il une maison publique ici?_” Who would ever guess that these two boys are looking for a simple inn? The Canucks of Beauport have no inn, as they have no _maison publique_. But there may be room at the mill or the grocery. At this other house, where the travellers sit down for a moment to drink a glass of water, the people politely excuse themselves by showing them the loft where the whole family sleep, the only bedroom in the house. At last, under a less poverty-stricken roof, they are offered the best room and a bed with coarse, unbleached linen sheets. But there is no coarseness in the hospitality of the Binets, who do not lock them into their room like that funny old oysterman who had seen Washington; they even ask their guests if they would like some brandy with their breakfast. No, good lady, a plain apple will taste better to us than any drink.

The next day they set out for the Falls. The spot from which they can see them best has been appropriated by a mill-owner, who has his mansion and grounds there. Very sorry, dear sir, but we are going to cross your land with as little fuss as if we were in Concord. It appears that you supplanted on this spot a mighty lord of the last generation. But mighty lord or not, there is a great natural spectacle here, and the view belongs to the humblest of walkers who comes from a distance with his bundle to see the Falls. What do we care for your land-title? Sir William and Sir Henry here have a right to enjoy the sight to their hearts’ content.

There should still be time to go and see the Falls of Sainte-Anne, a simple matter of thirty miles on foot. On the road they constantly pass wooden crosses and little shrines to the Blessed Virgin with ex-votos. Now and then they meet some villager wearing a cap of red, blue or grey worsted who bids them a polite good-day and lifts his hand to his bonnet. How civil and human they are! Even this fat, friar-like personage in his black, priestly robe--what can these fellows do for a living?--who appears at the door of his parsonage, where they have knocked to ask their way, gives them a friendly greeting. There is no inn at Sainte-Anne any more than at Beauport, but here too there are good souls to put them up. The master of the house, in his red cap, has the true Norman stamp; he talks with his stubby pipe between his teeth, which makes his Canuck French very hard to understand. Just the same, two fellows who have come from New England feel very near home here, very near and very far away at once, much further away in time and space than the excursion-ticket had given them any reason to expect. They are in the heart of old Normandy--Henry has returned for one night to sleep in the cradle of his race. He may not be thinking of this perhaps, but it is very much to his taste here. The villages, the streams have such charming names: Rivière de la Blondelle, Rivière de la Friponne, Rivière de la Rose, Rivière du Sault a la Puce, Pointe aux Trembles ... How can he help feeling that he belongs to the race of poets-without-knowing-it who thought of such names as these? All the little houses turn their backs on the road, perhaps the better to preserve the fragrance of the old country.

After the visit to the Falls and a good stiff walk along the Saint Lawrence, they stop again at nightfall at a farm where they pass a very agreeable evening chattering French in the great kitchen. It is Sunday. William’s pipe pays a tribute of incense to the little Canuck gods who have never died on the cross. What they cannot make intelligible because of their accent they write. This little girl knows how to write. Henry amuses them all by drawing a map of the country in chalk on the old oiled table-cloth. They are the best of friends in no time. With the few words at their disposal they talk about the soil, for that subject can be expressed in very simple terms. The good people talk about “senelles,” and Henry at first supposes that they mean snails till they show him the little red apples of the hawthorn. They also go out for some real apples to give the two strangers, beautiful, firm, glossy apples that have just been picked. In the autumn fragrance of ripe apples, Mother Earth says thanks in a universal language.

These poor Canucks, who are so gentle, with their rather humble politeness and an intelligence that seems to have been arrested in its development, are pitiful creatures in the eyes of you Yankee tourists, and you make fun of them because you are so clever and so strong. But what would you have been if it had been perpetually rammed down your throat by your father and your father’s father that the one great thing in this world is to obey our holy mother the Church? You would have been dunces, and you would have been mean, hard-hearted dunces. You would not have had the openheartedness, the simple courage, the good nature and humanity of these people. (Henry is thinking of the clear, laughing “By gosh” of the wood-chopper from Quebec who had come to see him in his cabin.) A little of the wealth of these “poor souls” would not come amiss in your pockets, shrewd fellows that you are.

But they must rejoin their fellow-excursionists. Quebec. Yes, the soldiers in red, the priests in black, the nuns, the seminarists.... You have seen enough of them. To Montreal on the boat, and then the train that is to carry you home. In the car the inevitable wag of the party begins to imitate the cry of the cabmen in the streets of Quebec. Among these prosperous Yankees a silent man is thinking of the landscape along that tremendous river, so many miles wide, with its falls, its islands, and the little children who said good-day so politely to the strangers on the road. Reckoning all the expenses, the journey to Canada has amounted to $12. A little more, to be sure, than the net profits of a year of farming at Walden. But he does not regret his money.

Henry has cousins at Bangor, in Maine, the stepsons of his Aunt Elizabeth, one of whom is in the lumber-trade. He has never gone back there since that time in his twenty-first year when he had wanted so much to find a place as a schoolmaster almost anywhere. While he was living at Walden, he was seized with a desire to go up and shake hands with his cousin and do a little exploring with him in the forests up there. Henry lived in the woods, and the woods are cousins of the forest. One special attraction was that mountain which was more than five thousand feet high and in the midst of the wilderness and still almost unknown, Ktaadn. A royal mouthful, with that dense primitive forest he would have to penetrate before reaching the giant and offering it the homage of a very small cousin who had come a very long way with his knapsack to dine with His Mightiness.

On the last day of August, in the second year of his stay in the woods, he left his cabin (no need to bolt the door) and set off with his outfit in his haversack. From Bangor, Henry and his relative, the lumber-merchant, reached by buggy the meeting-point of the two branches of the Penobscot, where two companions were to join them. On an island in the river, where some degenerate Indians were living on their lands, they engaged two of the latter who were to serve as guides. One of them pathetically called himself Louis Neptune. The real journey began here.

Humanity, in this region, already presented the rough, honest features of a wood-cutter in a red flannel shirt. A solitary store stood for trade; it was filled with all kinds of “sweet cakes” upon which the lumberers threw themselves like starving men after their long fast in the woods. They also sold cartridges and toys for the children who were anything but visible. Perhaps these too were to amuse the wood-cutters. The road stopped here; they marched forward in Indian file. The forest had engulfed them; from an elevation they saw, as far as the eye could reach, nothing but its sombre green bosom. Pines, beeches, birches fraternized and struggled over the moss. There was no animal so scarce as man, and what a surprise it was to encounter him in the form of Uncle George, as he was called, living here on his lands so far from everyone, with another man and two women and his beasts, like a pasha! They were to spend the night under his roof, for it was here that the two Indian guides were to join them.

Excellent Uncle George, offering his hospitality with such an open hand to four travellers, and refusing to take any recompense! It was easy enough to see that his ancestors belonged to the good Scotch race. And what hospitality! Henry saw them preparing a royal dinner over an enormous fire with logs as long as an axle-tree: on the table were ham and eggs, wheat cakes, cheese, salmon, shad, sweet cakes and stewed cranberries, all in profusion. And butter in such quantities that they gave it to you to grease your boots with. Henry felt very much alive in this land of Cockaigne. Henry the sober rejoiced in this munificence, for it was all seasoned after his own heart and everything was so simple, so grand and so beautiful in this forest setting. He dreamed at Uncle George’s of that “larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age,” where his blessed fellow-townsmen, those dear little provincial souls whom he knew all too well, had died of their stinginess, and the large spirit, the magnificent generosity reigned that he had found here in the remote depths of the woods.

Louis Neptune and the other Indian did not arrive, and Uncle George consented to serve as their guide. They would lose nothing by this. With a neighbouring settler whom they persuaded to join the party, there were six of them in a boat that played in the cleverest fashion with the current, the rapids, the whirlpools and rocks on a level with the water. George and his neighbour Tom were quick and sure-eyed boatmen. Henry was enraptured with the sport, which was all new to him. This was the logging country, where the great felled trunks adventurously jostled their way down the watery road and came to a stop in piles, waiting for the flood to dislodge them. It was a country of lakes too, big and little and strewn with islands. They were now on North Twin Lake; it was evening, and in the moonlight they rowed by turns, singing, pausing now and then to listen to the voices of the solitude. Henry no longer knew where he was nor what adventures lay before them through these interlacing waters and islands....

At the loggers’ camp where the expedition halted in the afternoon, they had had some tea and sweet cakes; this was the last human vestige in the direction they were going. And now as evening had come they made camp, cooked their supper, and then, stretching out with their feet to the fire, gossiped a little before going to sleep while they studied the starry sky. By daylight, through the clouds that encircled it, they had already caught a glimpse of the giant’s brow. This was a trout country too, and the fish fell upon the bait ravenously, shimmering like flowers as you heaved them out of the water and flung them on the bank. Henry, the veteran fisherman, had a dream about them. He dreamed that he was fishing the whole night long in a miraculous shower of these flower-fishes. The vision was so acute that he was compelled to get up early in the morning and go and see whether it was true or whether he had only dreamed it. He went to the bank, cast his line and in the moonlight caught as many as ever he could want: trout and roach leaped and fluttered just as they had in his dream. They were like flying-fish.

The party was obliged now to leave the boat and turn towards the mountain on foot. Uncle George had never been further than this spot. So now it was Henry, rover of the woods, who took the head of the column. Following his old custom he took the compass and steered straight through the dense forest for the foot of the mountain, without seeing it. By noon they had breasted their way over so many firs and birches that their stomachs were groaning, and they broiled some trout on sharpened sticks, each with his own fish and stick. Gathered about the fire, they were like six sorcerers fishing in the flames. That night they camped within sight of the summit. But the guide was too impatient to wait for the next day; he scrambled up alone, on all fours, hanging by branches, slipping and recovering himself, till at last he reached a rocky plateau where he could reach with his finger the skirt of a cloud. And the next morning, while his companions were still struggling in a chaos of rocks, there he was on the summit, on the last ridge, pressed on all sides by the clouds.

He had hardly expected to find the Giant in such a savage humour. The little man who had come to pay him a visit felt rather overwhelmed; the spirit in him was silent, intimidated. He had hoped for some sort of rugged smile. But no, the Giant sounded as if he were muttering between his granite teeth: “What the devil are you doing here, you little worm? Go back to your mother.” The Giant had no invitations for a little man who had made such a long journey and run the risk of breaking his neck to see him. He was a crabbed, secretive Giant who didn’t like people to meddle in his affairs. Had this rather cold welcome somewhat disheartened Henry? The country through which he passed on his return, after having tumbled down the mountain by the bed of a torrent, drenching himself to his heart’s content, was stamped with an almost menacing severity that chilled him at times. The desolation of these dense, infinite forests, without a suggestion of a path, without the faintest sign of anything akin to this biped who was groping his way and had to scramble up to the top of a fir-tree to get his bearings was so enormous that he felt excluded, baffled, effaced--so utterly that he wondered, as he touched his own body, if it was not itself matter without a soul.... Had he had to come all this way then to find the limits of his own wilderness? Was such a region as this, absolutely devoid of any relation to humanity, outside his domain? Would the gods of his own wilderness at home refuse to haunt the forests of Upper Maine? In that case Walden would find its master here. Was that so? Strange, anyway--very strange.

He did not become himself again till he heard the laughter of running water and found the boat once more. That was human at least. The Giant no longer weighed on him, nor the mighty roof of the forest. They descended the stream; the rapids were terrible. You should have seen the two men with their spike-poles, catching hold again of the empty boat after letting it drop over a fall, leaping into it and allowing themselves to be whirled down the rapids, cool and collected, familiar with all the tricks of this crafty water. When they reached the neighbourhood of Tom’s house, whom should they see but Louis Neptune and his companion, each in his own canoe! In their old clothes, broad-brimmed hats, broad capes, they looked like veritable blackguards. And their explanations were like their looks. It was not their fault that they had missed the rendezvous; they had been the victims of a wild jollification and had not yet recovered from the effects, poor devils. It was all right. And they were welcome to their muskrats too.

A glass of beer at Tom’s, a farewell to Uncle George, whose dogs were mad with joy at the sight of their master and fairly devoured him; then off for Bangor, Boston and Concord.

Henry was coming back to see his cousin again. This mass of virgin forest, with its watery veins, dappled with lakes as the lakes were dappled with islands, attracted him as a kind of challenge; and this ursine wilderness disturbed a little the thought of his own. Seven years later, the pair were off again, in an open wagon, on the road from Bangor to Moosehead Lake. This time the Indian they had engaged as guide and paddler met them as he had promised. No drunken Louis Neptunes this time. Joe was a good-looking lad of twenty-four, short and stout, with small feet, a broad face, eyes narrow and slanting towards the temples, wearing the red flannel shirt of the lumberman. Although he knew all the American slang, he was a full-blooded Indian.

This time they were not going to disturb a Giant in his stony meditation. They were setting out by water for Lake Chesuncook, another solitary majesty but a less lofty one. After crossing Moosehead Lake on a little steamboat, they carried their canoe and provisions over to the Penobscot. It was a joy to Henry to watch Joe tarring the little boat, which was nineteen and a half feet long and painted green. They sat in the bottom on birch-bark mats, and there were two big paddles which they used by turns; they sat with their legs stretched out or tailor-wise and sometimes knelt. Whenever a bird appeared, Joe said its name in the Indian language--a strange melody, as if the bird were naming itself. You couldn’t help thinking how happy the creatures would have been at the Creation if that great poet, the Redskin god, had been there in his paradise to name them.

This was the country of the moose, as big as a bull or even a powerful horse, with two palm-leaves on his head for horns and delicate hoofs that divide very far up and are flexible when he bends over. It was a long time since Henry had done any hunting, but his curiosity was too lively for him not to accompany the two others when they pursued the moose, whose tracks they saw on all sides.