Chapter I

Someone has died in the village: the man who bought the house on the square a year ago--the retired seaman.

A new face that has soon disappeared. Perhaps he had his reasons in choosing for his retreat this straggling village, twenty miles from the city from which he came. Or perhaps it had been enough for him to chance upon it one day, a city-dweller in search of a resting-place, to be won by the fine elms and maples that sheltered a gracious village, nestling among the low hills and deep woods and named after the slow-moving river that watered the broad meadows: Concord.

For a man who had lived in the bustle of a port after a life of adventure, everything there breathed a blessed peace. Nor was the silence of the fields too sedative for one who had come from a capital. Concord smiled in the agreeable spectacle of its thousand inhabitants, farmers, workmen, tradespeople, village officials, and formed a stopping-place for the stage-coach, the travellers, the carters who passed through it on their way to the high pastoral regions of New Hampshire. There was an inn, there were taverns where they served you a stiff glass of liquor, several stores, the Town Hall. There was the wooden church, too, and a fine stone jail that sheltered the county criminals. They even hanged people there now and then. A man who was accustomed to the world would not feel too remote from civilization.

Perhaps, too, the renown of a spot where the country-folk had offered a bold and decisive resistance to the troops of His Britannic Majesty, at the dawn of the Revolution, had affected his choice. But this memory of twenty-five years ago was of far less importance than the promise of the forests of pines and oaks and the fields and the footpaths along the slopes for a man who knew he was ill and was looking for a retreat where he could recover the strength of his lungs.... In the pine-scented air of Concord floated the hope of a cure. And here he had indeed found himself at rest, forever. The pure air of the valley had not been able to restore the consumptive to health, no, nor the whey he used to take at the houses of his friends on the days when they made cheese, nor the simples from which he had made a syrup for his evil cough. A man of moderate height, but broad-backed, who would once have seized a barrel of molasses and carried it on his head. An old seaman, in short, dying now of consumption, at the age of forty-seven, in the year one of the nineteenth century, in the house on the square that he had just bought the year before, and going to his rest in the cemetery of a New England village, twenty miles from the ocean that he had put between himself and his kindred, the Thoreaus of Saint-Helier.

For he was a lad from the Old World who had set out to seek his fortune in the colonies, leaving behind him at nineteen a little green island in order to attempt a great continent of mystery and chance. In Jersey, where he was born, his family lived in comfort as people of substance, of good Norman stock, speaking the old _langue d’oïl_. How would the old family name sound in another tongue? The mother was a certain Marie le Galais, who had had nine children and was in her seventy-ninth year at the moment when her John, over there, had just been laid, without her knowledge, in the Concord cemetery, laid there by the children he had left behind him. The late Philippe Thoreau, her husband, had taken over the business of his father, a wine merchant, with a branch in London, where two of their daughters had married extremely well. They belonged to the solid bourgeoisie, these Norman Thoreaus.

The younger son of a numerous family, John had not waited for his twentieth year before yielding to the invitation of a sailing vessel that plied between Boston and Saint-Helier, and he had set out, leaving his family to their casks on the little Channel island. John had gone to sea. On his first long voyage he was shipwrecked and suffered much. At Boston, along the docks, he found employment with various ship-chandlers. Then the war broke out; no more work. The Harbour was blockaded by the British fleet. He dug in the trenches round the town, under the fire of the guns. Then he shipped on a privateer that set out in pursuit of English vessels: for a Jerseyman, this was to follow one of the hardiest traditions of his race. At the end of the war his share of the prizes enabled him to open a shop on Long Wharf, where, with one partner, he carried on business for twenty years. John had not discredited his family; in the sale of molasses and other substantial products, he had resumed the family path of business and sound principles.

At twenty-seven he married Jane Burns, the child of a Scottish emigrant to Massachusetts and of the daughter of a Quaker who was a sailor too. When she died, after fifteen years, he owned, aside from the proceeds of his prosperous trade, the town-house which Jane had inherited from her grandfather David, the Quaker: a fine house worth all of $10,000. A widower, forty years old, with a houseful of children--the eldest, eight years old, still a little girl--John Thoreau, the merchant of Long Wharf, took for his second wife a certain Widow Kettell. Shortly after this, finding his health affected, he sold out his business and retired to the country to live on his income.

And now the house he had bought on the square at Concord, thanks to the handsome fortune amassed in these twenty years of trade, sheltered a woman widowed anew and the little children of whom the oldest boy, John, second of the name, was fourteen at the death of his father--and four others bearing in their breast a heritage that weighed more heavily than the few thousand dollars that were to come to each of them....

* * * * *

A child was born on the Minot farm, on the Eastern edge of the village, by that road down there, a little to one side, which they called, no one knew why, the Virginia Road. Perhaps because it dived down into a vague country, in the other direction from the road that led to the market-place.

But there was no need to take the child to the market-place. The father with his wife and his two chicks, Helen, not yet five, and John, who was three, found themselves there, for want of anything better, because his mother-in-law Minot, left a widow for the second time, had given him a chance to turn his ability to account on the farm. This agriculturist by accident was the eldest son of the old sailor who had come to Concord to die: John Thoreau II, now thirty years old and a man upon whom fortune, far from smiling, had turned its bare teeth.

No luck yet for good little John. Nevertheless, the paternal shade had guided him along the right path: he should undoubtedly have been a merchant, like his father, like the Thoreaus of Saint-Helier. Good blood would tell. After a year of school to complete his primary studies begun in Boston, he had lost no time in apprenticing himself to their neighbour, who kept a store and added to the dignity of a merchant that of parish Deacon. Thus the potent sisters Grocery and Piety took the little store-clerk by the hand. Then he enlarged his experience of the world and affairs at a small dry-goods store in the little town of Salem. The kindly epoch still existed when people were not afraid of humanising trade by offering you a glass of liquor over the counter, when you had made a sizable purchase.

At twenty-one, rich in practical knowledge acquired elsewhere and with a few bank-notes borrowed from his good step-mother, John had returned to Concord to open a store. The beginning was most promising, but he took a partner with whom he had a misunderstanding--the result was a law-suit, which he won. Meanwhile the store had failed. He had to begin all over again. Elizabeth, his older sister, had married and gone to live in Maine. John followed and joined them, establishing himself at Bangor with his brother-in-law, on the edge of the wilderness, where the Indians were their best customers. Was John homesick, or was the trade insufficient to maintain two managers? However it was, Concord soon saw him back again, and at twenty-five, like a wise little man, he married there.

This charming, sprightly Cynthia certainly brought our brave John the greatest happiness of his life. But she brought him nothing else; so the two of them set out together to try their fortune in Boston, the great city. Who could tell, if one had had no luck thus far in villages and small towns, perhaps one was cut out for success in a capital. Not in this case, not this time. The solidest wealth they acquired was a new baby, John, third of the name, following Helen, born the same year as their marriage. And then they returned to Concord, to the house of Cynthia’s mother, the farm where Cynthia herself had been living at the time of her marriage. Home enough for a young family without any definite situation; before tempting chance elsewhere, a little farming, to help the mother-in-law, would serve in the interval. And then the maternal presence would not be unprofitable for Cynthia, during her imminent confinement.

Little chick, born by chance on an out-of-the-way farm, when your grandfather died in a big house on the town square, are you as poor as all that at the moment when you are cast upon this earth where he, the old privateer, has been resting for sixteen years? In your veins the calm blood of the Thoreaus is united with the impetuous blood of the Dunbars; from this mixture you will be able to make something perhaps, if you have a touch of fancy. Your father is a fine, sturdy fellow, serious and kind-hearted, who is doing his best to make his way with his three little children. If he has not developed into a great commercial strategist, fate has made up for it by giving him a superior wife. A very good thing, for your arrival in the world has not improved their fortune.

No more than her husband was Cynthia a child of Concord. They were of the same age. Just as he had come as a boy, with his people, so she had come as a little girl, with her mother, from New Hampshire, where the father whom she had never known, Asa Dunbar, had died. Cynthia was the daughter of a minister, a minister who had been at the same time a counsellor-at-law and a zealous freemason. On the maternal side, the great crisis of the Revolution, which had given the first John Thoreau an opportunity to amass a handsome capital, had ruined the family, who had once been important and influential gentlefolk. Colonel Jones, her grandfather, who, with his eight sons, had taken the side of the Crown, had shared the lot of the vanquished: confiscation of their land, imprisonment, banishment. The chivalrous and adventurous race of the Joneses had left their mark upon Cynthia in traits as pronounced as the obscurity of her husband’s character: a taste for elegance, a gift of eloquence. She knew how to talk, and there was as much conviction in her words as in his silence. She loved to set the lively tone of a bow of ribbon singing on a piece of cloth, like a declaration of independence. She was not afraid to startle people by a freedom of speech that was sharp enough to be malicious. It was a handsome girl with dark eyes that John had taken for his wife, with the calm assurance of these little serious, sedate men. Her charming voice, when she sang, the animation of her talk, the vividness of her replies had made up for his abysses of silence and self-effacement. Happiest of harmonies, secured by an unassuming man whose wife talks and is cheerful and has enough wit for two. John and Cynthia formed one of those happy unions to which one brings genius, the other his lack of genius, and both have courage enough to meet the ups and downs of existence.

Cynthia, the youngest of her family, had two sisters, Sophia and Louisa. She had the luck to possess a brother also, the gem of the Dunbars, the rare flower of generations that had multiplied their branches to blossom at last in the alliance of a minister with the daughter of a gentleman-farmer. Charles Dunbar had taken the sunny side of life. He had not asked it to make dollars grow on the counter of a shop or in the furrows of husbandry where a man strains his back, greatly to the detriment of his good-humour; he had let it go its own way, since it was full of amusing things and he himself was a strong man, capable of mastering it. Not stupid enough to settle down, he rambled from village to village, an eternal apprentice whose apprenticeship pursued its course especially in taverns. A splendid voice, bursting from his athletic frame, was enough to assure him success among his jolly comrades. But Uncle Charles was also an incomparable wag. It is not enough to draw the long bow and talk well in a tavern to put the company in a cheerful mood: you must show what you are. Then you do astonishing tricks with cards, toss your hat into the air and catch it again on the top of your head, swallow your nose, or juggle away the knives, forks and plates on the table, refusing to restore them until the landlord agrees not to charge you for your meal. And as if this were not enough, you seize a ten-foot ladder, stand it upright without any support, clamber up to the last rung and descend on the other side, pushing it back with your foot. Yes, and handsomely. Would any of these gentlemen like to have a try?... But old Charles’s great feat was wrestling. With him wrestling was a primal, necessary function, like eating and drinking. In the most natural way in the world, he would walk into your house with the flattering remark, “Come along, I’m going to throw you. Out with you.” And you had to go out, spread some straw in the yard and place yourself in position. Of course he did throw you. And then he was as pleased as if you had invited him to the best of dinners at your house. This passion for wrestling seized him suddenly as sensual desire seizes people who are badly brought up. And you never had to be afraid that he would break your ribs: an accomplished wrestler, he would displant you neatly, like an artist and a gentleman. In this vocation he had lost all his teeth at the age of twenty-one, which did not prevent him from having every blessed one of them later on. Perhaps they had grown again--you never can tell with these fire-eaters.

To judge him from this unconventional manner of living, anyone might suppose that Charles would have been the victim of bad habits. A great mistake. He did not gamble, he drank only in reason, he did not smoke--at most, for the sake of politeness, he would take a pinch of snuff if you offered it to him. His dress was always correct and his language free from coarseness. Among his rare privileges Charles possessed that of suddenly falling asleep in the very midst of whatever he happened to be doing. Sometimes, with his razor in his hand, before his mirror, without any reason he would succumb to sleep; and in order to conform to the strict observance of the Sabbath which, as we know, prohibits sleep, he found it necessary to devote himself on that day to some absorbing occupation, such as sprouting potatoes. In pursuing these artistic hobbies one does not gather very much of this world’s goods, but he had found more enviable advantages: a reputation solidly established in various public places and the promise of restoring to the Lord a soul as fresh as on the day when it had been confided to his care. Charles Dunbar, you are the salt of your family. Your kindred should bless you. And as for this baby nephew who is just born, to have an uncle who can hold himself in equilibrium on the top of an unsupported ladder and possesses that formidable voice which, from the strand, hails a ship at sea--what self-command this will give him later, and what carrying-power for anything he may have to say or proclaim.... If he is seized with a desire to leap over some obstacle, his legs will remember you who, while leading your oxen, sprang over the yoke with your feet together, once, twice, a mere nothing to amuse the lads of the saw-mill whose eyes popped out of their heads at this phenomenon.

When she was eight years old, Cynthia had set out by sea on a ramshackle boat, with her mother and her two sisters, to see her Jones uncles, the refugees in Maine and Canada. It was shortly after this rather risky voyage that the mother and the daughter had come to Concord, where the former had remarried and the latter, fifteen years later, had fixed her destiny, sought her fortune, by uniting her poverty with John’s.

To their possessions had now been added this youngster born on the farm. The 12th of July, 1817, was inscribed on the tablets of the household. Also the date of baptism, three months later, when, stoically, uttering no shrill cries, Henry David (this latter name in memory of Uncle David, who had just died) entered upon the Christian life. One enters as one can. But whatever might be the virtue of the baptismal water and the minister of the parish, Dr. Ripley, would it prevail against the farm and the old deserted road on the edge of which the child had been born? Glance at this farm: it is an ancient two-storied dwelling, with plank walls discoloured with age, a setting as appropriate for the birth of a god as for the coming of this poor little soul. It stands on a knoll where the grass grows at will. No fence. In front, a running brook. Around it, meadows and orchards, where you smell the good soil and the turf. The nearest neighbour is a long way off. The old winding road leads to no point whither the interests of the villagers call them; and left to itself, it smiles at its turnings, its ruts, at all the weeds on its banks, inviting the fields it passes to share its delightful futility. The family occupies one wing of the dwelling, the other half being inhabited by some people who also have a little boy, in whose company John, with the authority of his three years, drives the turkeys to pasture.

For the rest, the revenues of the farm were so small that the mother-in-law had barely enough to live on. Eight months after Henry’s birth, the household went to rejoin her in the red house where she lived at the end of the village. The head of a family whose peregrinations had not yet brought him wealth tried to think of some better means of providing bread for these three little importunate beaks. One must manage somehow. What remained of the paternal heritage was scarcely worth talking about: the numerous minors having once grown up, the lawyers and the trustees had left it nothing but a pale memory. At the death of the Widow Kettell, each of the children of the old sailor had pocketed a few crumbs, and that was the end of it. And John’s share of the Boston house was already mortgaged. He had to put his wits together. John had an idea. A vocation is not so easily renounced, especially when it is confirmed by the voice of one’s ancestors. Suppose they were to try Chelmsford over there, ten miles away, and take a store. Cynthia could wait on the customers, while John, who was very fertile in manual resources in spite of his modest air, would try to find work outside. He could paint signs and do odd jobs, and they would get on somehow.

Henry’s Aunt Sarah had already taught him to walk when, at sixteen months, he took part in the exodus to Chelmsford. They remained there two years and a half, keeping a grocery with a bar, near the church. They sold spirits. They were honest and upright. But it’s always the same story: fortune, which so joyously allows herself to be captured by dare-devils, has not even the shadow of a smile for these honest and reserved little Johns, even when they offer it a glass over the counter. A pity, but there was no need to be discouraged because a fourth child had been born. This one was a daughter; she was going to bring them happiness and they would call her Sophia. Once more they set out to try the capital, where people were rolling in money and might be willing to let a few crumbs drop into the till of an honest man. They found a perch in the southern part of Boston, calling on the way at Concord. During this journey a pair of infant eyes that were hardly open as yet to the images of the world were impressed by the glimpse of a wild pond in the setting of an immemorial forest. The gaze of a tender little creature, who knew nothing about the gold they had set out to win among the rich, secretly absorbed the lustre of this pearl.

In two years of the great city they had three abodes. The town offered every facility for sending to school a little boy of five, but there was no great harvest for his parents to reap there. They were obliged to give it up as hopeless. These removals had brought the young household no success.

There was nothing to do but to return to the fold, to the house on the square in which Thoreau the father had died, the father upon whom fortune had smiled, and where John’s two sisters lived. It was the last resource. John had been an apprentice in the village, he knew everybody there, and there the little ones had been born. After all, it might be better to live in poverty in Concord than to tempt chance elsewhere. Off for old Concord. An honest little man, pursued by ill fortune, with four chicks and their mother, was to seek his destiny henceforth in the shadow of the great elms.

* * * * *

You will soon be six years old. Your parents have toiled and tried every expedient to make ends meet, but for you who do not enter into these domestic considerations life is a long holiday. All Concord is spread out on your lap, like a great book full of pictures and songs.

You go forth and meet the adventures the roads offer. A dog passes, a man, a cart. The great elms sigh. A cock calls in the distance of the grey-white village. Two neighbours are soberly gossiping. The first beautiful drops of a shower drum on the leaves and the wooden sidewalk. You have no desire to turn back. The little girl ahead of you is hurrying to the store. All these and how many other marvels, from morning to bedtime, the long stretch of unmeasured hours, are all for you, you who are not a king’s son, but the little Henry of the man who lives on the village square, in the centre of a bustling, confused, spangled universe, striped with sun-rays and surprises.

You are growing, and about you as you grow the world takes form. When you are big and able to stand firmly on your feet, people depend on you and entrust you with important commissions: leading the cow to pasture, running on errands in the village. When you are very big you are allowed to do everything; and if you have a brother who is much bigger than you there are no limits to the conquests you can make together. You are bound only by the four points of the compass. The country about the village stretches away to the impossible. You have a knife in your pocket, with which you can whittle anything you please, a whistle, a weapon, a slingshot, a wagon. You make a trap. You rove on wild adventures through the sunny meadows, gorge yourself with huckleberries, run about, playing Indian, dig a cave, build a hut and store it with provisions. At twelve you go hunting with your brother. To feel the fowling-piece hanging from your shoulder, to be the crafty master of the life and death of the creatures who have no suspicion of your overwhelming power, to lie in wait for them, press the gun to your shoulder, take aim, see the animal roll or tumble over: fearful joys. There will be others later, but will they have the pure taste of these? When you penetrate into these deep woods, a swarming world opens before you that probably has no end. No village, no houses, no parents, no fences any more; nothing but the great pines and the solemn oaks, assembled like conspirators to hold counsel far from listening ears. You are alone and very small under those heads touching one another up there, but you feel no fear. You are armed, and, besides, your big brother is with you. In the middle of the woods there is a pond towards which the arches of foliage bend amid their garlands of wild vines. You come there to fish for pouts and breams. You have brought your lunch to spend the whole day there, as if you were on a desert island, on the edge of this smooth water that mirrors the patriarchal trees. Night has fallen; you have made a fire on the stones and before going away you seize the red brands and shake them, describing fiery circles in the air, then throw them into the water where they hiss and go out. Then, when the flames are dead, you find yourself once more in the dense night, in a darkness thick enough to cut, and groping your way you return to the village with your fish--two Concord boys, who scour the earth barefoot the better to possess it.

To be a Concord boy is to be intoxicated with the joy of the river, the two rivers that unite here, the sluggish one and the lively one, and pull as well together as John and Cynthia. It is to swim by the hour in the cove with your comrades, under the arbour of pine branches that shelters your duck-like sports. In the spring the overflowing river floods the meadows--an immense sheet of water from which the trees emerge: it is no longer fifty yards from bank to bank but half a mile wide and more, like a great lake with gulls flying over it. There is hay-time and the cranberry season; there are the Cliffs from which you descry the faraway peaks where you have never gone, where perhaps the world ends--since over there is the empire of the setting sun. You sail a boat with a paddle or a mast, drink in the fragrance of the banks, the waterplants, the crumpled mint-leaves, or you carry your line with you and are engrossed for hours, dividing your attention between the mystery of the depths that spread quivering up to your float and the squadrons of clouds that cleave the great sky spread out over the meadows. At these times you encounter now and then an old fisherman, leathery and taciturn, who blends into the bank of the river, his ancient cloak having taken its colour with time, and returns at evening with slow steps to his little shanty on the edge of the village. When he is fishing you have no desire to disturb him; he looks so grave. He is not amusing himself, he is conducting a rite--the rite of the compleat angler. No one pays any attention to the old chap: but Henry knows him well and is attracted by his silence. Perhaps he has been there since the time of the Indians; he is ageless. This must be old Father Musketaquid, who is on the most intimate terms with all the fishes.

And then the immense charm of the passage of an occasional barge on the river, come who knows whence?--the rivers, whence come they? whither do they go?--floating soundlessly towards nowhere. One day you see that barge moored at the edge of a meadow; the following day it has disappeared. To what race do these men on board belong? What language do they speak? They have come from the world outside and yet they know the river so well.... When will they pass again? On these boats are piled hogsheads full of lime or bricks or iron-ore, with wheel-barrows. How do they manage not to sink under this formidable weight? And yet, when you climb up there, it is firm, it does not give. Strange. And these men who, they say, sleep in their boats and live there as Henry lives in a house on the village square.... How he would love to sleep in a boat too, eat there, light a fire, spend the whole night on the water! There are people who insist that these boats have sails like the boats that go on the ocean; they have seen them. How can you believe that? They pass like the birds, conjuring up other lands and a whole unknown world to which the river may lead, a world that is certainly impenetrable. Henry dashes off with his brother to feast on this marvel. But he has still more beautiful sensations. Once a year a group of men with reddish brown faces, altogether different from the men of the village, come and camp under a tent in the meadows. They make baskets and offer you collars of glass beads. Among themselves they speak the language of sorcerers. They have a canoe which they manage in the strangest fashion. The big people tell you that they were once the masters of the country, in the days of old Tahataivan, before such a place as Concord ever existed. If you had a canoe and were one of the Redskins, you would not make baskets; you would spend your time hunting and fishing and making expeditions; you would be one of the kings of the country.

There is, of course, a school to which they send you, for it is a fine thing to know how to read straight off, like your father, who reads the newspaper. But the class is only an interlude between two sessions of school out of doors. The river, the ponds are hard and smooth as steel; it is the season for skating and sleighing-parties on the snow. What does it matter that your sled has no iron runners and the other boys make fun of it? You love it just the same because it is your own, and nothing in the world could induce you to give it up. When you know how to read, write and cipher, you still have a great many things to learn, for your family dreams of a more brilliant future for you than that of a store-keeper. So you enter the Academy founded by the well-to-do for boys who want to become learned men. You must master Greek, Latin, French, plunge into the classics, and grind away till you are sixteen.

To follow the course at the Concord Academy and become better educated than your parents is all very fine, for Concord has so many ways of compensating you. But afterwards? These ambitious parents have conceived the bold project of sending their younger boy to college to learn what the Concord Academy cannot teach him. To leave Concord.... Ah, how desolate the Greek, the Latin, the French, this stupendous human learning looks at the thought of all you must leave behind in order to fathom its mysteries!... How heavy your heart is, at sixteen, Henry, with these early tender affections to which you are to bid an abrupt farewell as you set out for Harvard ... you, the son of the little store-keeper, to serve your time in a department store of learning.