Chapter V (1)

In spite of all, dear Concord, a man would have to be very perverse and strangely made not to accept you with all your faults, your absurdities, the petty prosaicness of your townspeople.... Not to embrace you as heartily as the river-bank embraces your Main Street, without debating your good and your evil.... Not to respond with a smile to the smiling unison of this little world where farmers and citizens, tradesmen, workmen, store-keepers, educated people, after the purest tradition of democratic equality and simplicity, are scarcely distinguishable from one another.... In the shade of those great elms that spread harmony over all, how can one fail to feel tenderly sympathetic with this family of honest souls?

See the two white churches there, the tavern and the jail, where they will receive you without the least compunction. Few of the things are absent from the village that make the solid happiness of the world. Not even a bowling green and a centre of high culture. There is the Mill-dam, where the people gossip and munch the news of the day, the blacksmith’s, the post-office, the shops. And the little wooden houses with their Doric pediments, painted white, with the gardens stretching down to the willows to reach the water. Everything is in its place, everything in concord. The village sings in its grey-white, in the green of the meadows and the pine-crowned hills, with the approbation of those beautiful big maples on the common, as serene as philosophers. And on Sunday, when no townsman would have the bad taste to abuse the peace of the Sabbath by playing the piano or taking his skates to the river, and an awful silence reigns over the wooden sidewalks, how good it would be to allow oneself to be carried along by the godly simplicity of the town, dozing blissfully to the sound of the clock that spreads the enchantment of submission.

Yes, indeed.... And there are moments when Henry could envelop in his affection all the households of dear Concord. For example, when he sees the roofs smoking far away over the crests of the young elms; when humanity melts into the landscape or is only heard in the sound of an anvil, the shout of a ploughman with his team. At such moments as these he was in concord too. From a distance it was so easy to believe that people lived there whose daily life flowed like the river that bears you along as it gives you its freshness. Why, when you have taken part since your infancy in the activities of the village, are you not the dupe of appearances? The smile of Concord hides so many ugly thoughts, mean habits, dull conventions; there is so much tacit deceit in its simplicity. Why has not nature made you complete by granting you the adaptability that accommodates itself to the little frauds of ordinary life, to the devious path that discreetly spins the thread of its days?

It is not Henry’s fault if he is at odds with it all. Instead of the treasures of indulgence that nature might have given him, she has provided him with a sense of smell too subtle not to be offended by its odours of routine and rapacity. He thinks of that old farmer, living alone on his big farm with a man to do his housekeeping for him, who gets up every morning in mid-winter, when everything is frozen hard, between three and four o’clock, puts on his boots and his coat, lights his lantern and goes out to the barn to milk his seventeen cows. Of course it is warm in the stable near the cows, but just the same.... Rich, without heirs, he yokes himself to this task of milking, his one satisfaction in life being to fulfil punctiliously the function of a miser. You see him returning to the house, his morning task ended, and eating the breakfast his man has prepared while the master was at work at the seventeen udders. All very fine, you say. But how surprised he would be one of these nights, when the animals begin to talk, if he heard a sisterly cow say to him: “Go back to bed, old man, and when you wake up glance over your accounts again. See how much cream your life has given you for all that your pails of milk have furnished.”... Obstinate soul, perverse rebel, not to be able to forgive these virtuous farmers because, while their first concern is to fill their barns with good hay, they think they absolve themselves from the sin of avarice by posing as protectors of letters and the arts.

In the good society of Concord he finds himself among notables of Philistia who like to feel that they are the choice spirits of New England. These are the upper spheres of the village. Henry avoids them, for his lungs are not adapted to the air they breathe there. The language and attitudes of society people have the unfailing effect of precipitating the mercury of his thermometer to the bulb. On the rare occasions when he has been exposed to the hostile and malign influences that float in the humblest parlour, the experience has left him with a bad memory. It is there that you encounter those people who say to you, with their faces shining with amiability: “Oh, my dear fellow, how well I understand your love of nature.... It is so poetic....”

The victim has his ferocious words or silences for cases of this kind. If the lover of “nature” and “the poetic” were shrewd enough, he could collect a good pint of the most acid disgust this mouth and these pursed lips are able to distil.

He cannot always avoid the peril under its most artful forms. When he has charge of the lectures at the village Lyceum, he cannot refuse to carry the manuscript of the distinguished lecturess who is going to discourse this evening on Woman: she has rolled it up in a handkerchief and he has thrust it into his pocket before returning it to her. He would be very glad to fulfil with stoical politeness for half an hour the obligations of ladies’ man, but he would be happier if his pocket, the next morning, did not retain such a fragrant reminder of the lady, of her manuscript and her dressing-table. Feminism and perfumery have craftily conspired to get the best of his lining. Similarly, when he has allowed himself to be taken across the threshold of some stifling room where, under the pretext of a “soiree,” thirty-odd idle women, young or not so young, are chattering, simpering, warbling, in company with various gentlemen who are dumb with admiration, the sad thing is not merely the two mortal hours that he has passed there, wretched and humiliated: the worst is the shame afterwards of his own weakness which has prevented him from fleeing on the spot or committing some enormity that would spread panic in this dovecote. The pretty girl to whom they have presented him would have been charming perhaps if she had been willing to keep still among all these ladybirds. In masculine society, after a social dinner well seasoned with anecdotes, he feels just as unhappy till he is past the door and free. In vain Henry holds himself on the defensive: on another occasion there is that benign soul who intrudes upon him with an oily affection for his person, an odious, vulgar familiarity.

In the presence of these samples of cultivated humanity, Henry’s natural stiffness is intensified and he becomes so icy that it is difficult to imagine him ever laughing--as a good lady had the hardihood to remark to him one day: she had never heard him in his gay moods, for she had encountered him only during a call in a region where, owing to the atmosphere, the laughter of this laugher was extinguished. The polite people of the village, the church-goers, those upright and self-sufficient folk, provoke his curt witticisms, the sharp rejoinders that suddenly rivet a fellow, with outstretched wings, like an owl over a barn door. Henry inevitably reaps antipathies and lasting enmities. The clever ones think that he wants to astonish and scandalize people by his paradoxes. They think he is pretentious. His reputation for merciless satire and a cynical misanthropy, odd to the point of perversity, is of his own making. If you roundly abuse philanthropy and philanthropists, of course it shows that you are not very anxious to win the esteem of the world. The plain-dealer sometimes amuses himself with this game of massacre, delights in sharpening his sarcasms, but without wasting any considerable time on the characters who play in the village comedy: the keenest of his sarcasms is to ignore them. When they come to his attention he packs them off as intruders: let these fine-mannered gentry air their graces somewhere else and leave common mortals alone. A substantial citizen, whoever he may be, is always a slightly ludicrous animal in the eyes of a workingman like Henry. A man’s virtue is all nonsense if it is disconnected from his sins.

Happily Concord has something more than the silence of its elms and maples to unite it with the true humanity. It also possesses those congenial souls who gather about the Sage in the household where Henry has been living, a spiritual family whose friendship has a far better flavour than all the sarcasms. The pipe and frock of Edmund Hosmer, that shrewd farmer who knows what the earth is made of, make up for all these mean peasants. Amos Bronson Alcott, who has returned from an adventure in which he has vainly tried to consummate the marriage of dreams and reality in a paradisical existence, may be a cause of wit in others, but his presence is really like an anticipation or a recollection of the golden age. Henry has no particular taste for the sky-blue tint of his idealism, so delightful to old maids who are devoured by spiritual love, but he feels a brother in this poor dreamer who is so helplessly unfitted to follow the ways of the world. He lends him a good hand and digs beside him, when Alcott is settling at Hillside. In every stroke that he takes with the pickaxe, as they sweat side by side on the slope, the beautiful Platonic dreams incarnate themselves in the shape of friendship. Henry is not unhappy as a comrade and handyman in the service of philosophy. Who knows but the good Alcott’s immense generosity of soul does not exist to counterbalance all the miserliness of the neighbourhood?

With Hawthorne one doesn’t turn up the earth. In the company of this imposing personage, a simple heart sheathed in solemn gravity, Henry is inclined to present rather an iron visage: like black cloth and corduroy, they are somehow unable to be friends. In handing over his boat to him--the boat of the great voyage, which he manages like a virtuoso--Henry, the dry joker, remarks: “It’s a boat that manages itself, you see.” The grave Hawthorne tries it, with the awkwardness of a beginner, and the boat, deprived of its soul, obeys no more.

Of this spiritual family, however, the one who is most closely akin to him is William. They have been comrades since the days before Henry’s departure for Staten Island. William Ellery Channing, one year younger than himself, is the nephew of a Unitarian minister, a professor at Harvard. He has married a sister of Margaret Fuller, the animating spirit of the _Dial_. An odd soul, whimsical, fanciful, not very sociable, childlike, hard to please, charming, full of imagination and in other respects the best companion in the world. William also writes verses, but in other respects, in spite of his independence, he is not wholly exempt from a touch of Philistinism. He has a knack of sharpening Henry’s love of paradox and leads him rather to force the expression of his cynicism in regard to the civilised; but he is an invaluable friend for toning you up again when you are feeling a little slack. And when they set out together for an afternoon’s ramble they are the happiest of comrades, welcoming the surprises of the road in the intoxication of an open-air chat. Of all possible cronies he is almost the only one whom Henry accepts, the only one who does not throw a blot upon his afternoon landscape; with William he can have a silent understanding. To whom but William then, and those fields that are free from fine manners, do you show yourself as you are, with your boyish zest, your fits of gaiety, the bursts of buffoonery that make you dance and leap over the ice when you are skating? William is the witness of those spontaneous moments when the spleen of a young man who has been frozen by the sight of stupidity breaks and falls into pieces like a mask of clay. What is under the mask reveals itself only to this friendly nature, this friend after one’s own heart.

A lover of the wilds can enjoy friendships like this that establish in the greyness of the village a few luminous points proclaiming the presence of his own kind. Why are they not always complete enough to satisfy him fully? Too often Henry feels a kind of embarrassment in his relations with brotherly minds. The impediment is not of his own willing. He asks to be filled to the brim, and these half-unbosomings leave him dissatisfied with himself and others. When he is away from them, alone in the woods, it seems to him that the silence of his surroundings speaks of a truer friendship than that which he feels in their company: it is a silence whose “yes” melts all discords. A tree knows the art of winning you without discussion, while in the presence of a human face you resist, you are a stubborn mule, a bellicose intransigent who will not appear to approve of what he condemns and then demolishes his adversary--his friend--with blows of crabbed speechlessness or bitter irony. A human face is a provocation; at the least pretext you discharge a “no” that shoots like an arrow.

Even among such friends as these, if an opinion, a gesture, an attitude happens not to suit him, Henry rolls up into a ball and erects his quills. Touch him then if you dare. Look at him, bristling with resistance, ready to defend his position against all comers, fiercely resolved not to yield an inch of ground. No doubt the ground is too precious for him to sacrifice an inch of it. Pride? Conceit? Touchy susceptibility? It is rather an excessive, irreducible, militant devotion to various axioms that he identifies with himself. The gods have made a Henry who is all of a piece, and they have placed him on the earth among objects and souls that are different and queer. He reacts. He has no particular desire to please you. But you happen to be his friend. Well, one owes a friend the purest truth one has. If friendship ceases to be a perfect harmony, it is a struggle, not an exchange of concessions. So Henry abruptly says his “no”: forces rush from all the provinces composing the individual Henry Thoreau, throwing into disorder everything in their way. He must attest, amplify, exalt the difference, to establish the fact that he is this and not that. The Sage, a friend of long standing, knows something about all this: the ferocity of this instinct of contradiction shocks the man with the exquisite and conciliatory smile, though it does not cool his affection for this headstrong soul who sometimes puts his patience to a severe test. The other friends are also very familiar with their “terrible Thoreau” in whose eyes esteem seems to be the strongest of reasons never to capitulate. And they allow themselves to be cut by his plain speaking or bitten by his caustic spirit, on occasion, since he will not give himself on any other terms. A naked simplicity is necessary to this fearfully difficult man. Manners fill him with horror, like an indecency. If you allow him to see that after all you belong to a world in which the desire to be correct and respectable taints your gestures or speech, well, for the moment that is the end of your understanding. You have shown the tip of the black cloth from which the frock-coats are cut. To be a man, a plain man, would be so fine and so sincere. Why this smooth, mealymouthed parlour-talk? Henry retires into his shell of silence. This is not the sort of thing he was expecting from you.

As for those people who are as sober as a church-pew, they cannot understand why a savage wants to whet his fancy and his paradoxes and gravely make a butt of their respectable heads. Innocent souls who are skilled in cleaving the interstellar spaces but whose terrestrial envelope is of a prudently bourgeois cut have difficulty in adapting themselves to the diapason of an artistic sensibility. That is why Henry, who is both savage and artist, never feels so fully as at the times when he is away from his friends the value of a friendship that would have the serenity of a landscape in which every blade of grass has a true word to say.

However it may be with men and their manners, Concord is in the centre of a territory that is rich in living springs where all deceit is drowned, and Henry has his home with his own family in the heart of Concord. In the great kingdom of the afternoons--wind, sun or snow--the little kingdom of morning, evening, night--shelter, stability, ties: the house, the garden.

The little kingdom is peopled, not like the great, with secret lives and furtive encounters as he passes, but with beings to whom he is united more closely than by blood: by the memories of childhood and their sweetness, strong as the memory of a brother, the sharing of every day, and the tenderness that cannot refuse itself. There is his mother, lively, talkative, full of geniality, the animating spirit of the little house, skilful in the art of making a little go a long way when times are hard, a housekeeper as heedful of the comfort of the boarders who are entertained at the family table as in mending the pockets of her son’s trousers. There is his father whom nature has endowed with a middling stature and an air of prudence, a rather retiring man because not destined to command but to find his way in a tacit submission to the justifiable authority of his wife. As nature has not developed in him to excess the imaginative and poetical sense, he is the better able to play the part of a cautious, circumspect little father who looks after his pencils, attends to his work, silently, sedulously, with a mind set on details, good man that he is. And then Sophia and Helen, Henry’s two sisters--Helen, the elder, with the big eyes, the strong nose and a mouth as expressive as her brother’s. Finally, Aunt Sophia and the devoted Aunt Louisa, when one or the other happens to be living with the family.

This is the harmonious household the thought of which filled with such ardent melancholy the heart of the exile in the Judge’s house, as if he had heard from afar the shrill sound of the delicious music-box, the gift of Richard, Margaret Fuller’s brother, with which the family regaled itself in the evening. At home, the ne’er-do-well, the jack-of-all-trades cheerfully does his share of the work, taking charge of all the small tasks that need to be done.

The valuable little services that he renders his family extend even to his boat, which not only bears occasionally the two noble dames, Sophia and his mother, who enjoy a trip on the river in the evening, but serves him for gathering driftwood to stock the wood-pile. The wood that he hoists on board with a pole and then carries on his back to the house, saws and splits with his hands, has a tawny life that warms you a great deal better than the rotten wood these silly rich people buy at so much a cord; for you have already sweated in transporting it and cutting it up, and when you see its flames dancing the trouble it has given you makes them dance all the more merrily. It is wood which, far from costing you anything, gives you returns. It is of every kind and has plenty of stories to tell you--old pickets, old planks, old stumps, dead trees, condemned, adventurous timbers which, instead of rotting in their abandonment, are going to give the Thoreaus before they vanish the last rays of their glowing hearts, leaving beautiful ashes that will be valuable for washing.

In the garden, it goes without saying, Henry’s function is as important as that of his mother in the house. He raises enough potatoes for the needs of the table and occasionally has some to sell. You can order them by the bushel from the market, if you prefer. You can settle yourself in your slippers in a corner by the fire, without knowing what it is to have logs from your own wood-pile. You can taste the joy of living like a potato or a stump. But he is a gardener to whom the potatoes, even before they have been gathered, have given something more nourishing than their starch. Henry’s work in his garden brings with it another recompense than the beauty of the melons, the pumpkins, the fruit-trees, the rose-bushes that he cultivates. Besides, the garden is that one place in all the world where the home is contiguous to the earth.

When the family is obliged to leave the big house where they have lived for seven years, the Parkman house in the centre of the village where the school was begun, a scheme is adopted which they could not have conceived, still less executed, without the boy’s aid. For the question is one of building a house. They are going to live at the end of the world, in a lane on the other side of the railroad. A big undertaking, a man’s work, to excavate the earth and lay the foundations, pave the cellar, take the measurements, collect the materials. He would be happy to do it for other people; he is still happier to do it for his own family. Henry does the digging, the masonry, the carpentry, the slating with his father. He plants the fruit-trees. There is a fine view from the house; and besides, it is somewhat sheltered from the routine and the tittle-tattle of the village. He will be able to sleep well under this modest roof that he has put up himself.

Aside from the aid of his skilful and inventive hands, the man of the wilds does not refuse his family that best of himself of which he is far from lavish outside. What the chestnut is to the bur the big child who amuses himself by the half-hour with the kitten or dances a jig with his intimates is to the “terrible Thoreau” of those sharp replies. Is he tamed then? Well, perhaps so, if you mean by this that his resistance, in the family circle, adopts a tolerant and courteous manner--which his friends would greatly appreciate. If, at table, the maternal voice occasionally interrupts your dialogue with a friend, why vent your ill-humour instead of listening till this gifted woman has had her say? Her son patiently lets the downpour pass, as if he were under a pine-tree in the woods, and at the last drops acquiesces with a little bow: “Shall I take the liberty ... my turn?”--then resumes the interrupted discussion. Because he himself despises the newspapers, is he going to cast a scoffing or disdainful glance towards his father, deep in the paper he is reading from the first line to the last, with the touching faith of an honest shopkeeper? Nothing more natural than that the good man should like to roll the lollipop of the “latest news” in his mouth to get rid of the taste of the lead. Let him roll it as much as he likes and go up to bed: his son will not plague him with demands for advice, for he relies for everything on his own personal experience and looks for little or nothing from the knowledge of his elders. Henry’s indulgence is not blind. He knows the prejudices, the limitations of this beloved little house, and he notes them on occasion in his Journal. But his home is an indisputable reality to which he comes back every evening, on his return from an adventure, finding there certain special ways that may not have very much in common with his inner life but that belong to him just the same, exactly how he could hardly say--his father’s love of good work, for instance, a perfect pencil or a phrase that hits the bull’s-eye, and his mother’s vivacity of imagination and lively spirits that are always ready for a little mischief. And if the sisters, the excellent aunts alone had been there to warm the wanderer, all his roads would still have converged towards this fixed light.

Is the little flame of the family fire fed at the same sources as those wandering lights that attract his eye on his walks and make him stop as he stops before his friends the trees? But that is another story. These lights are not will-o’-the-wisps but miraculous beings that win the favour of an unsociable soul, as if they had no connection with a humanity that he has tried and condemned. Go and ask the cleverest person in the village to explain this strange fact to you: you have heard of a young fellow who is intolerably conceited, who affects a gruff, stiff, top-lofty air when he is in company--such is the report of the polite people--and this workingman here, if you happen to ask him whether he knows this boy, tells you that he is the most amiable of companions.... Then there are two Henry Thoreaus in Concord? The workingman tells you about a delightful boy, sincere, simple, always ready to do you a good turn and always to be depended upon; in describing him he uses the sort of words that come to you when you are speaking of a brother, without the least allusion to his conceit, his stiffness, his sarcasms. He does not know of any other Henry Thoreau; there is no other in Concord.... It is simply incomprehensible. And you will never understand it if you are not of the understanding kind.

There exist, in fact, among the human fauna of this village, of all villages, magicians who have the power of calling this other Henry instantly into life, the Henry whose friendship is gained for all time by his own kind. There are certain characters who have no part in Concord society--obscure little nameless people, men who do odd jobs, farm-hands, small farmers, and there are people of dubious reputation, bad boys, who are akin to the waste lands, fishermen, Irishmen, wood-cutters, small fry, loafers, weeds in the eyes of the village bigwigs. Henry finds them very much to his taste. These latter are real people, not play-actors. The artist is touched, the heart of the man is captured. The grain of sympathy that is buried in the depths of this unsociable soul can rise to the surface just the same. And he shows them his true face, which is unknown to the prosperous townspeople, the well-to-do farmers and the deacons.

When he sees one-eyed Goodwin, the tough old fisherman, making for the river-bank at any hour of the day, small and thick-set under his old oil-cloth coat, carrying his basket and pole or fetching home in a handcart the wood he has collected in his boat, or dressed in his short blue frock, chopping stumps for his winter after having laid wall all day, Henry feels less isolated among men. Goodwin, the vicious character, as the good people call him, puts a little poetry into their sanctimonious dullness. He lives his life cheerily in the freshness of the river and the fields, far from all these souls who are so poor in imagination and sincerity. It is the same way with those hunters, drunkards, rascals who are periodically sent to serve a term in the House of Correction, like that big, lanky young blackguard of a Melvin, with his baskets and his game-bag, accompanied by his lean, bluish-white, black-spotted hound, who are so much more your own kind than the village lawyer. Their gunshots sound so free in the woods, and you remember the time when you wandered about the country like these blessed pagans for hours with John. Melvin is an antidote to the morality of the deacons. Melvin is a part of the beauty of Concord.

And there is Rice sawing the planks in his workshop. He is a master of the art of living. Whether he is digging in the earth or going off hunting or fishing with his boy, everything seems to amuse him. The sacrosanct law of stupefying labour was not invented for him, for he always consults his own time and pleasure when he works. At the mere sight of him you forget the ugliness of humanity, you graze the reality of a life that is strong and leafy as a poem; you are no longer alone in the world with your dreams and your sadness. Rays of joy that warm you as you pass, the gift that the poor make to the solitary walker.... How could you fail to be enlivened after days of misery by the childlike gaiety of old Brooks who, at eighty, bent double with age, sets out every day with his basket under his arm to gather a little wood and whatever else happy chance may offer to cheer his old days? To-day, dressed in an ancient frock-coat, he has come back from an expedition, barefoot, an axe in one hand, in the other carrying the boots that he has filled with apples because his pockets would hold no more. He has also brought back a thrush with a broken wing that he has found, and old Brooks is very happy in his find--as happy as yourself as you stop to hear him tell about it on an autumn evening made still lovelier by the old man’s delight. Bit by bit he has gathered in two cords of wood for his winter; but they will certainly warm him less than this schoolboy’s joy in roaming the countryside which has remained intact in the heart of a poor old grandfather who blesses the life that puts thrushes in his path.

Why are there certain beings of whom it is enough to have a glimpse to be happy? When you meet old Minot and cross a woodlot with him, everything seems to sing at his mere presence while he tells you stories of the days when he used to go hunting. One glimpse of his little cottage on the hillside is enough to make you forget that there was ever an ugly house in this world; it is the first to show signs of the coming of spring and the last to bid farewell to the beautiful season. How easy it is to understand why old Minot has never wanted to budge from Concord, when even his rheumatism cannot keep him indoors! It is up there you must hear him, surrounded by the old furniture that he has inherited from his ancestors, to the tick-tack of a clock that was sounding before Massachusetts existed, reciting to you the stories that he knows almost by heart, stories that are engarlanded with minute details and good old solid and obsolete words that gratify the ear of an artist. He has a tiny bit of land that he has always cultivated himself, without help, mingling his work and his pleasure, drawing from every inch of ground the great happiness it gives him with his bread and asking for nothing more. He lives with his sister, and his only regret is that because of his rheumatism he is no longer able to go out and cut his own wood. But what a clear flame his life yields! He has the finest ear in the village for the thread of a bird’s note, however thin it may be. How you would love to toil away for an employer like that, to be the man-of-all-work for the master of the little house on the hillside where the spring first breaks!

You perceive, solitary walker, how the ugliness of humanity dies away at the foot of this hill? And how it vanishes at the foot of other hills than old Minot’s? You may not have realized this, you who walk with your eyes on the ground, meditating, but look: the sunlit smile of this old woman ironing at her window, which is full of blossoming daisies, cleanses the whole earth as you pass, as if you had never seen it before. Take a good look around you, as you go through the world. You may find that it is strewn with men and women whose beauty you have never suspected and who belong to you as much as Goodwin or old Minot.

Henry is certainly not at war with humanity when it presents itself in the form of this wood-cutter who knows the woods so much better than the finest naturalist: his clothes have a wholesome smell, he is happy enough for two, and you could work beside him all day. And you would like to follow old Hayden too as you see him pass and repass with his team, with the serenity of a good workman. The world of labourers is a friendly world where you cease to feel that you are among strangers. There is nothing in them that irritates you; your love of sarcasm vanishes in their atmosphere; there is nothing awry, nothing that you could find fault with in them, nothing that is not assured of your affectionate indulgence. No parlour, no store, no model farm in the village shelters a face as human as the faces of these Irish labourers, camping under their plank shanties along the new railroad. Simple digging-machines, ridiculous louts, in the eyes of noble, pure-blooded Yankees, are these brawny souls condemned to their killing tasks for a tiny wage. The scantiness of his own respectability is confirmed in Henry’s eyes in the friendship he feels for these slow-witted fellows, navvies, ditch-diggers, scavengers, ice-cutters, indefatigable executors of the heavy tasks of the earth. To his mind their accent, their awkwardness, the dirtiness of their big, boyish, sunburnt faces are far less to be sneered at than the unctuousness of some doctor of divinity whose hands have never rubbed against anything but a cake of soap or the Holy Scriptures.

How could one fail to like that big-hearted Michael Flannery who toils away all day with such bubbling good spirits! It is as if the more energy he spent the more inexhaustible were the good humour he has drawn from heaven knows what miraculous fountain in his native Kerry. Naturally the respectable exploiters of other people’s work take advantage of this and abuse his simplicity. Michael has won a prize at the Cattle-show, and the farmer who hires him has taken the prize-money away from him, maintaining that his wages pay for his time and that his good luck belongs to his employer: to swindle a lout of an Irishman is a good Yankee joke that will never shut you out of the kingdom of heaven promised to prosperous farmers. But this is an act that completely upsets Henry’s serenity: he immediately takes up a collection and returns to Michael the money which the miser has cribbed. And when he sees that little Irish monkey of a Johnny going to school all alone through the snow from the shanty where his parents live in the woods, as sober as a judge under the rags that so oddly cover his four or five years, Henry thinks of the satisfied air of the alms-givers and ostensible philanthropists who brave the winter courageously muffled up in their rich fur-coats. What does a mere little weed of a wood-cutter’s child matter, toddling along without stumbling through the intense cold with scarcely a shoe on his foot or a rag on his back, looking as if he found this world royally well made for little Irish boys who go to school where there is a bench to sit on and a fire in the stove? And in his mind he strips these worthy rich folk and puts the rags of the poor Irish on their backs to drape their philanthropy--takes their purple and fine linen and tenderly envelops this little scrap of half-naked humanity. Henry himself has no purple and fine linen to give Johnny, but what he has he takes to his parents: an old pair of pantaloons and a coat from which Mrs. Riordan can work up some trousers and a schoolboy’s cloak so that he will not have to miss school for the futile reason that the snow is too deep this winter.

For the rest, whether it is Irish Johnny or some New England youngster, the world of childhood is an irreducible power that tolerates no assumed formality nor any veil of reserve. To make an end of the “terrible Thoreau,” nothing is necessary but the two black eyes of some little boy under a big cap or the manoeuvres of four small kiddies bringing back a big horse from the pasture. You will find then that he is just a big boy himself, touched, captivated, won, a boy whose shyness feeds upon solitude and wild nature and who, in order to love you, asks only to be able to find in you that simplicity and candour, that true and savoury quality for which his childlike heart is greedy.

Henry feels affectionately sheltered under his own family roof: nothing in the world could induce him to leave home as his grandfather did for good and all to seek his fortune far away. But when he meets on his path these poor, ignorant, simple people, small folk, little souls, a strange feeling of kinship awakens in him, stronger than the affections of home, as if at bottom they were his real family.

* * * * *

It was an old desire that had haunted him very often, a desire that he had cherished no doubt from his childhood, when he had been a great chief who had withdrawn into his cave to inspect the spoils of conquest and dream of future expeditions, to go and live alone in some solitary spot--as Wheeler had done, a fellow at Harvard who had established himself in a shanty on the edge of Flint Pond to devote himself in all tranquillity to the study of Greek. A well-tempered character, this Wheeler, who slept there on the straw like a stableman or a soldier and later went off to study in Germany, where the poor fellow died. Henry liked and admired him greatly.

Yes, it was the dream of having some sort of shelter bathed in silence where he could listen to the things, both within and outside himself, that were lost in the Babel of the village. He had once been on the point of realizing it when he had just missed buying the Hallowell place, the beautifully ruined and solitary old farm he had seen on the river as he passed in his boat; but he had not come to terms with the owner and it had remained nothing but a charming fancy sheltered behind its screen of maple-trees. After all, it was better to have missed this opportunity, to have been spared the humiliation of seeing his name printed in the records as a property-owner.

But the old desire had not died. It spoke to-day with more authority than ever. At twenty-eight, with some experience of the solutions the world offered for the problem of a livelihood and no inclination whatever to adopt any of them, there still remained the old question of supporting himself. His little jobs as an occasional day-labourer gave him at best a precarious and insufficient means of living. It had become clearer and clearer that Concord was not very anxious to employ the particular talents of an “amateur” who undertook to do his work with the respect of an artist for his art. Well, suppose he were to free himself from all these needs that were not worth the trouble he took to satisfy them? Suppose he were to simplify his life?

Existence in his own home, to be sure, was frugality itself. But when you looked closely, how encumbered it was with superfluities! Cut down, cut down! This luxury perverts the life of a man. It usurps the place of true values that only ask for a chance to blossom. The truth of life is a fragile plant that a gardener should protect against evil intruders. A house brings with it innumerable duties. A village is a buzzing, trampled thoroughfare, poisoned with gossip and neighbours. You could get away by yourself for a few hours, but there were times when domestic thoughts, village thoughts clung so tight to your skin that you could not shake them off in the open air and they reduced your adventure to the vulgar proportions of some cockney’s holiday in the country. You would give anything to rid yourself of these leechlike thoughts, not just for a few hours in the afternoon but for good and all, for days and nights together. You would give anything, for example, if the first sound you heard when you woke up in the morning were not to come from some neighbour who is clearing his throat. You would give anything not to squander so many precious hours, sacrificed for the privilege of being a citizen who is taught his P’s and Q’s on the lap of a parish. And what wouldn’t you give not to dream any longer of the beauty of living, but to experience it completely for a while, without alloy, unrestrictedly, in all its freshness, free as the open air, naked and real, from dawn to the day’s end, and the same to-morrow--to feel that you were _existing_ on this good green earth?

There happened to be other needs that quickened this desire for a little retirement. Henry had already written a few pages with which he had reason not to be too dissatisfied. His articles, his studies were only a prelude, an incentive to exercise himself more rigorously at his trade as a writer. There too he had to strip himself of vain ornaments and find out exactly what he was capable of and whether he was really worthy of doing something. He would work well in this peaceful seclusion. The outlines of a book were vaguely taking form in the pages of the Journal. He would see.

Henry needed a retreat, to audit his books with all care and discover just where his personal affairs stood, to examine various true, essential matters, including himself, face to face.

It was a more serious business at bottom even than the desire to clarify his existence and live more or less alone, after his own fashion. It had the charm of a great difficulty to be overcome; instead of running away from it or trifling with it, he wanted to come to grips with it and find out, without any beating about the bush, which was the stronger. It was a tempting opportunity to prove to himself that he could provide for his subsistence with his own hands, without aid, giving himself the beautiful margin of leisure that is indispensable to a man if his life is to have a meaning and yield its flower. We shall have a good try, my shopkeeping friends. You set yourself up in business. Henry is going to follow your example and launch out in an enterprise of his own, at his own risk and peril, with his ten fingers and the wits of a ne’er-do-well for his capital. When you are the son and grandson and great-grandson of merchants, you may turn your back on your patrimony, but you do not discard from your destiny the taste for certain kinds of operations. On the other hand, you are not going to puzzle your brains trying to calculate your profits if you succeed. And if your speculation is unfortunate, you will still have the pleasure of telling about your failure.

A boy had been turning these thoughts over in his mind while tramping over the fourteen acres of woodland which his friend Waldo had bought for a little more than $200 last September, a spot that had taken Henry’s fancy above all the paradises of the domain of vagabonds. It was on the banks of Walden Pond, where the Sage carried his philosophy into the woods, drawn there by the sound of the name: Waldo ... Eden....

The circle of sombre branches reflected in the calm blue waters was an impression that he had preserved from his earliest infancy, and later it had been the goal of many an expedition. As a child, as a boy he had run off to go fishing, hunting, skating there, or to stretch out in a boat in summer, letting himself glide over the water to the waves of wild foliage that enclosed the pond. The spot had an incomparable charm and wildness, and although it was only half an hour from the village it was so retired that all the villages of the earth were lost and forgotten there in a distance beyond the sea for the explorer who prowled about its banks. An evil fame, a legendary mirage floated about these regions--an additional attraction. On the borders of the woods of Walden, on the neighbouring hill, in former times, all sorts of lawless characters, pariahs, escaped slaves, negresses who told fortunes and other riff-raff used to live whose presence in the shadow of the church would have been an offence to the purity of the village. The blackened remains of their cabins were still to be seen there. Henry liked to think of black Zilpha, who spun linen and had such a beautiful voice, and Wyman, the poor potter, unfortunate souls indeed. But the pond itself! Sunk in the shelving semicircle, a dark green mass drank in the deep blue of this miraculous glade under a great stretch of sky. The whole world was still, and he himself was a flood of silent wonder amid this population of pines and oaks.

How good it would be to come here and taste the quality of the silence! Who knew but this pond, meditating in its immemorial solitude, folded in upon itself in the quiet of the woods, might not have some important secret to whisper to him, if he became its confidant?... Many a time on its banks he had dreamed of a Waldenic existence and had taken the road home again to the village and his old ways. But now the little voice murmured among the reeds: My secret is not for a boy who has merely come on a visit. It is for the faithful soul who will come and live beside me, spending his nights and his days and mingling with his existence every hour of my own.... The little voice possessed an all-powerful sweetness for the senses of a lover, a solitary. Yes, to come and savour there the interminable summer evenings, drink in the first draught of air before the dawn, allow the winter to blockade him with snow as he listened to the beating of his heart in the frosty silence. To plunge into the pond every morning! To feel at home there, like a wild duck or a skater-insect!... Suppose, instead of the summerhouse which the Sage planned to set up there, some day, on his land, he were to build himself at once a house under the pines, on the side of the knoll that dropped off by a gentle slope into the pond?

When a beautiful castle in Spain that has been tenderly cherished for years finds a foundation like this upon which to rest, one hesitates no longer. The business is settled. Spring appears like a notification. Towards the end of March, in the year 1845 of the Christian era, Henry goes to his friend Alcott and borrows his axe; it does not cut very well, this philosophical axe--perhaps it has been blunted at Fruitlands, in that unhappy phalansterian enterprise--but he undertakes to sharpen it.

The builder has chosen his site, felled the trees to clear the space where he is to erect the house. The plan is already settled. Those pines will do for the framework. The other materials can be found at little cost. Why new planks when second-hand planks will serve perfectly well? A labourer’s shanty will give him plenty of timber, and he will only have to unnail it and transport it with all the accessories, not forgetting the old nails, which will serve a second time. For four dollars and twenty-five cents, an Irishman who is working on the railroad is quite willing to sell him the one he lives in; it will only be necessary to let the planks dry a little so that the air can absorb their Hibernian moisture. The materials are all ready for the work. The cellar is dug in the sand, where the provisions are to be kept. There is nothing impossible about setting up the frame for a man who helped his father to build their new house the year before; no need of a gang of skilled hands to plant a post upright at the corner where the roof is to rest. But if his friends offer to come and give him a hand with this heavy job of the timber-work, is he going to renounce the rare pleasure of working in the woods there with a few cronies who are not such good carpenters as himself perhaps but who are full of hearty good will? Alcott and Edmund Hosmer join in the party. Everything they say sparkles in the resinous air; all the preparations have taken time and it is May already. A philosopher, a farmer and a ne’er-do-well in collaboration nail together with affection the frame of a cabin that is going to support the weight of solitude.

It may be weeks since spring came to surprise old Minot. But it has been just as long, if not longer, since it took possession of the heart of a boy who, since the end of March, has turned his steps every morning, with his lunch in his pocket, towards his workshop in the woods. The little glade is covered with shavings; the work of building goes on amid the cheerful clatter of axe and hammer, and the surrounding pines gaze with a curious eye upon this neighbour who is coming to live there as if they had never seen old nails driven by so young an arm. It is only a house that is going up, a motionless house overlooking a motionless pond, but for the workman, blissfully alone in the woods.... April, May, June ... the light sings as in former days when he was building his little boat for those faraway expeditions--sings a chaplet of songs as long as the work that he pursues unhastingly on this piney knoll. The cabin is fixed to the earth by its roots, and it is to shelter the sleep of an explorer who is promising himself not a week or two but whole seasons of discoveries and adventures ... seasons that will be reflected in the eye of this big high window, seasons upon which this door that hangs here will open with a gesture of welcome and familiarity at the entrance of the cabin where Henry is going to sleep on this holiday evening--for it is the Fourth of July.

Up before dawn on the first morning, the builder stops on his threshold, goes out, takes a turn around his castle, comes in again, goes out again, looks up at his roof with perfect confidence in its power to resist snow, sun and rain, and only asking himself if it is not going to burst with the happiness contained between these four plank walls. In the woods some neighbours are singing and chirping. The fresh air pours through him as if he had come out of a tent. But the cabin is not a tent, it is spacious: ten feet by fifteen. You can stretch your legs in it. It contains everything: bed, table, a chair and, at one end, facing the door, a place for the hearth which is not yet built. The household utensils are in a cupboard. Under the floor, the cellar, and an attic above, each with its trap-door. The room is lighted by two windows, one in front and one in the rear. It has all the comfort and brightness of a living-room with the compact intimacy of a ship’s cabin.