Chapter IV (2)

He has put his boat up for the winter. But the river is still there for those who enjoy the wind, for them more than ever. It has prepared for them a solid floor on which they can whirl as if they were on a race-track. The skater has a double joy; he is the horse and the rider at once. He moves swiftly wherever his fancy takes him; the best runner is the merest lout beside him--the man on skates makes him look like a fool. The heavy boat was not of much use, anyway; its clumsy body was never able to follow all the windings of the river, and it was too timid to lead you to all the things you discover as you dart over the immense ice-sheet of the flooded fields where the little wooden bridges emerge like islets. Henry, an accomplished skater from childhood, can make fifteen miles an hour against the wind without straining himself. While the good William is covered with perspiration from the strenuous efforts he makes to keep up, Henry merely has a little watering of the eyes from the wind of the race. No, without winter and the kindness of the river offering its hard back, the master would never know many of the aspects of his domain.

Winter, the severe winter that is not a mere picture in the almanac.... When the snow-storms block trains and roads and shut people up in their houses.... When there is not a single sleigh to be seen in the village square, nothing but a saddle-horse that has just brought a farmer into town, Henry has gone out just the same, as far as the post-office.... The bitter cold creeps into the house, freezes the bread, the milk and the food in the pantry till you dread the moment when you have to go upstairs to bed, thinking of those sheets as stiff as boards against your cheek.... Indeed, you no longer know just how cold it is because the mercury of the thermometer has taken refuge in the bulb, as a snail in its shell. The earth cracks and splits; in the house the wood-work creaks. This is no reason for ignoring what goes on out of doors; after all, your skin is somehow related to the skin of the earth. If it cracks too, well, you will look through the cranny.

No need to go far to find a polar landscape. Here is Baffin’s Bay, there is Nova Zembla. The snow is waist-high. No longer any trace of the embankment of the railroad. The farmers have become cave-dwellers; the houses are buried half-way up the windows, but the smoke rises from the chimneys. The houses breathe. The silence is prodigious, it hums in your ears. The colours sing on the white sheet, red, blue, straw-yellow, purple, green, orange, russet, tawny. The light is pink, and your shadow a deep indigo.

What has the finest log-fire to say to those slippered folk who have never left the chimney-corner when the moonlight on the snow leads you by the hand through an enchanted palace, or on those days when the south wind melts the snow and the uncovered earth exhales an odour that invigorates you like the scent of strong meat, or on those evenings when you come back armoured in ice because it has rained while you are out and you are coated with rime like a gingerbread man?

Is there any romance comparable to the events of a walk on a winter’s day? The song that rises to your lips ... the echo that comes back to you deadened because the snow has kept a good share of the sound of your voice ... those vermilion berries sparkling with ice ... that hardened ground offering you a footway in all directions where you were never able to take a step in mild weather ... the living warmth that smoulders under the red catkins of the alders and in the blue of the silhouette of that Persian, with his hatchet in his hand, so tall, so imposing, so admirable that you would like to present your respects to him, just as if he were not your own shadow on the ice of the pond.... Winter, hard winter, great banks of snow without which you would never have known that downy intimacy in the padded hollows of the old earth, season of the warm, quick heart under the frost! Now, remembering the summer, you ask if winter is not also a person of substance, concealing under his white furs the rarest jewels of the year.

And that matchless moment when the spring breaks, just begins to break--what do you make of that? If you remain in the back of your shop while outside the wings of the swallows brush a man who is seeking for an answer to the disquietude he has borne within him in the bleak February or March landscape, you are a poor wretch who has deliberately deprived himself of the cream of earthly emotions. You are to be pitied if you have never prowled about then to receive the surprise of the first signs. The winter for you has been merely a torpor, and the end of winter will only be a renewal of the same old play, Rubbing Along--with the same old scenery.

The first bee has come out with numbed wings in search of the first calyx. This man has come forth too, for he has been on the alert ever since that day at the end of February when he found on the willows and the osiers an unusual lustre of red and green. He is expecting great news. Amid the dead leaves and the melted snow of a ditch he has seen two yellow-spotted turtles moving. He is greatly stirred because of a certain quality in the air which makes him think he is going to hear a bluebird sing. He looks for signs that will bear out his presentiment. On the watch from the ridges, he scrutinizes the deep blue of the inundated fields where cakes of ice are drifting about, and upon this mass of water which covers a good quarter of the land of the township there is a little shining white spot that catches his attention: he discovers through his glass that this is a little sheldrake which, with its companion, has taken possession of the waters. So one couple is already there, awaiting the coming of the procession. No more does he himself intend to miss the first measures of the music announcing its approach.

March thrills with the anxiety of a man who is following the steps of the resurrection. A robin has called, _svit, svit_. The black waves of the river have almost a grassy smell. There are sea-gulls in the air. The lookout-man scrutinizes the earth: bare and tawny, it reappears in spots, its bosom exposed to the rains that are going to fertilise it. The buds of the red maples are swelling. On a beautiful clear day, after a night of frost the sap flows if he makes an incision. Henry collects the sap to make maple sugar. He draws from his tubes four and a half pints, boils them down and obtains an ounce and a half of sugar. Fine. But his father cannot understand why anyone should bother to make bad sugar when it is so easy to get good sugar at the grocer’s. His father is right, as fathers always are. It is because he does not feel the maple-sap flowing in himself. There is no sap in his pencils.

Walking along his favourite path, the railroad-track, towards the middle of March, when he hears the bluebirds and sees them flying, Henry has a feeling of deliverance, as if some band that confined his chest had burst. He would like to fall on his knees and embrace the earth. The sound of a wood-cutter’s axe in the forest lightens his heart. What doubts can he have henceforth? From a pool deep in the woods comes the faintly perceptible _wurrk, wurrk, wur r r k wurk_ of a frog, a treasure to this keen ear that catches it. The air grows softer, an overcoat becomes troublesome. When the brooks break up, the saunterer sets out along the banks to hear the song of their awakening and watch the floating procession of the little rafts of ice. The fish hasten up-stream, for they too have heard the great news and wish to have the details. New arrivals are to be observed on all sides, a procession of travellers returning after a long absence. How many things they have to tell one another!

One day a boat appears, freshly painted, setting out to reconnoitre in the cold clearness. In the distance the village looks like a low island lying in the water. The wind brings you an odour of musk. The note of a bird that has come back sounds joyously in the woods as if he were giving a house-warming there. Since the birds have returned, there is one man in the village who rises before daybreak and goes out to hear them in the dawn of things, a man who can sleep no longer when he has heard that call flung from the tops of the elms along the street. A man who must needs inhale the scent of the earth in the early morning, a gardener who, when he plants his spade in the soil of his garden, once released from the frost, has a feeling of victory, not so much perhaps at the thought of the seeds he is going to entrust to it again as because of this new life which, stronger than the shoots of April, he feels germinating in himself.

No use for you to say, to excuse your own inertia, that this man owes to the unique quality of his senses the enjoyment he derives from a spectacle in the midst of which the village is monumentally indifferent. For nature has made him all nerves--visual, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, tactile. Henry, the virginal New Englander, is repaid for his chastity by the most voluptuous delights of the senses. It is a great pity if you have not been repaid for your own; but is that an excuse? The voice of sex has remained silent in him, or he has silenced it by a strict discipline for reasons of his own--because his race, his temperament, the gods of Concord demand it, and then because ... because that is the way things go, it makes no difference: nature will have her due. Henry drinks water, but the essences of the waste lands intoxicate him. There is no symphony orchestra in the village, but a common accordeon or a hand-organ in the street is enough to wring his heart, and a simple music-box enchants him. He eats little or no meat but no epicure could scent with a more delicate nostril the savour of a solitude that is peopled with secret lives. If carnal emotion at the sight of the human body has not been annihilated in him, it cowers in the darkness of so deep a cave that you will never catch a glimpse of it. But he has at his command five scouts who always have marvellous things to relate when they return to their master. They are able to put such delicate perception, such freshness into their reports that he could listen to them forever. Seeing, tasting, touching, hearing, smelling are a matchless intoxication when you are served by such stewards and have a soul in which their least declaration echoes and re-echoes.

Henry’s virility lurks in his eye. He has a look that envelops and penetrates pitilessly a piece of the landscape and probes you to the bottom if you form a part of it. Among the plants, the dead leaves and the debris he distinguishes some tiny creature which, to the ordinary passer-by, would be lost among the colours of the soil. But this man with the senses of a savage relies especially upon his ear and his sense of smell: a thing betrays or confesses its presence by the sound it makes or the odour it gives off. The thrush’s song in the woods touches the depths of his soul, but all space is strewn with fragments of music that ravish him, as a child is enchanted by the tinkling of crystal or the tick-tack of a watch. When he wishes to hear the news of the world Henry puts his ear close to the telegraph-poles along the railroad. You could never explain how astonished you are by this murmur of the ocean that reaches you from the heart of a vibrating mast. It is the same continuous story that a shell tells you when you put it to your ear, but far greater, infinitely richer and more sonorous. The listener, alone at the foot of the pole, far away from the post-office, receives a flood of communications; he cannot make out the words but their music is enough for him. It is as if they had been round the world before coming to ring through the pores of the wood; they have travelled so far that to receive them you wish you had a larger frame. The dispatches vary according to the humour of the day, the direction of the wind, the quality of the air. Henry never fails to stop as he passes and listen to see if there is a message for him. Very strange, the playing of this harp. You might pass twenty times and hear nothing but a vague trill; and then, all at once, some fine day, as if tremendous things were happening in the world, the wires begin to vibrate with an unheard-of intensity and volume. What you hear is yours alone; you may be sure that no one is eavesdropping at any other receiving-pole unless some youngster is amusing himself as you are, listening to the music, so much more beautiful than that of the locomotive passing along the track.

Henry’s big nose is no useless ornament: when he breathes the smoke of burning leaves or the first waterlily of the season that has just opened at dawn, all his quick sensibility flows into the sense of smell. Of the five messengers, this is the most faithful; its report carries conviction. When he picks a plant, Henry first smells it to see if he knows it; and even in re-reading some page he has written he _smells_ what is good and what ought to be rejected. The surrounding country is full of floating aromas that have come heaven knows whence, varying with the hours and the seasons but always there, and sometimes so fragrant as to make you think that your adventure has led you to the shores of the Moluccas, the Spice Islands.

And you speak of renunciation in connection with a penniless man who has for his daily bread such delights as these! When you see the wanderer returning from his rounds, perhaps chewing a stalk, you would not fling him a glance of contemptuous pity if you knew what he has brought back with him. First of all, good folk of Concord, the satisfaction of a man who has not wasted his day. A good walker, he has zigzagged about for miles. On the way back he has spent a quarter of an hour perhaps on the cliff, watching the sun sinking behind the Peterboro hills and blazing in the windows of the first houses in the village. Wachusett, all by itself over there, looked like a whale this evening at sunset. And with this sumptuous vision he returns, as the bats are flitting about, just as you are on your way to the post-office to get your own news.

In his pockets he carries the spoils of the day: notes that he has scribbled on his walk as a painter jots down a hasty outline in his sketch-book, and perhaps a few lucky finds, plant or fruit, egg or bit of moss, flint or bark. But among these finds there is one you would never count, if you were allowed to plunge your hand to the very bottom of his big pockets or even into that surprise-hat. It takes up much less room than a handful of huckleberries or chestnuts. The best of the spoils--can you guess what it is? It is the invigorated mind, the soul that has been stretched by the adventure of the day.... This imponderable that he has brought home from the wastes to fertilise his life and enrich his humanity is a rather big affair, you see, brothers.... This lesson he has received from the plants and the trees in the art of self-expression.... These spoils that a rambler has taken from your orchards and fields, you farmers of Concord.... This barely visible green which the plants and the mosses have left on his elbows and his knees.... This earth that he brings back on his boots, full of things to be born which have made the journey with him and for which he cares so much....

In the evening, in his room, when the shopkeepers are making up their books and the farmers are counting the loads of hay that have been brought in, Henry does not forget to note down these discoveries. They are not expressed in figures, hardly in words. They are not even palpable. But they fecundate the page that he is adding to his Journal.

For is it not a Henry-still-to-be-found that he has followed as a hunter follows the trail through all the zigzags of his walk? Is it not, after all, a reflexion of himself, in these faces in the verdure and the water, in these cries, this silence, this wildness, these odours, this swarming growth, these blue shadows on the snow--is it not himself that he has glimpsed at the end of the path?

* * * * *

Extraordinarily enough, one April evening in 1844 the man of the wilds returned from his walk not alone nor with one companion but accompanied by a whole troop of villagers. What was the meaning of this unusual spectacle?

It was Town-Meeting Day, a serious ceremony in a democratic community and one at which every loyal citizen, proud of being a necessary unit, was expected to be on hand. Henry, who had no love for voting and debating, nor any pride in the exercise of his civic rights, did not feel that his presence was indispensable. If he failed in his duty as a citizen and a unit, well, he could survive it. This little celebration was not for him. Let every man mind his own business. This day was plainly intended for a spring-time exploration; young Edward, still in college and Henry’s comrade because he was the brother of his friend Elizabeth Hoar, was going with him. They were to set off by boat on the river, and they were not coming back till they had found the sources of the Sudbury River. They were going to camp on the bank unless they found a farmhouse where they could spend the night. They were taking their fishing-tackle with them, having decided to live like savages on their catch. A magnificent prospect, while the citizens, conscious of their duties and their rights, were worthily spending the day palavering.

So they had set off, light-hearted, as in the old days when the big brother had gone off with the younger on a long adventure. They had forgotten the matches for the camp-fire, an omission that could be repaired happily at the cobbler’s, near the point of embarkation. It would be no sort of day without matches for two fellows gaily setting out over the world.

As the spring had not been rainy, the river was low and they caught some fish. When the time came for lunch they landed on the shore of Fairhaven Pond, the big bay with its little island adjoining the richest provinces of the domain. The two explorers had started a fire in a sunny hollow, a long way from the woods; they were about to eat their fish and they had the appetite of cannibals. But, lo and behold, if the tall, dry last year’s grass didn’t catch fire like tinder about the camp! They tried to put it out with their hands, then by beating it with a board, but all in vain. The flames were already eating their way up the slope and the underbrush was crackling.... They were stunned for a moment. “Where will this end?” asked young Edward, whose father, the old Senator, was one of the bigwigs of the village. The flames in their headlong joy were rushing towards the top of the slope and the woods in a transport of victory and Henry was sure they were going to devour everything. The woods once reached, it would certainly be the village next; the fire would descend upon the assembled citizens who were debating and voting. So there was nothing to do now but to run and charitably warn them of what was threatening. Edward, very much excited, leapt into the boat to go back by water. Henry, speeding through the woods by his usual short-cuts, would reach the village before him and give the alarm.

It was a bad business, but how could they have foreseen it? Many and many a time they had lighted a fire out of doors and burned a little of the surrounding grass without doing any harm. These furious flames had the most definite and perverse intentions: they were like a tidal wave of red rebels, even surer of their rights than the citizens over there. Henry raced through the woods, and, looking back, saw the great cloud of smoke behind him. The first man he met was a farmer driving a team who, when he was told what the smoke meant, cheerfully jogged on again: it was not his woods that were burning. But that other man over there in his field happened to be the owner of the woodlot where the flames were crackling at that very moment. He followed the messenger on the run towards the fire: but what could they do, two men, even if one of them was the owner, before that crepitating wave of assault?... A hundred cords of wood, ready for delivery, were threatened with disaster. They must go for help.

Henry was out of breath. He was going to stay there and wait for events, while the owner went for reinforcements. The battle-front now extended over half a mile. Henry watched it rushing on. It was a fine spectacle. He had forgotten all about Wheeler, the man to whom the largest of the threatened woodlots belonged. He was a deacon, yes, just so, as chance would have it. You go off fishing and light a fire to cook your catch and innocently set fire to a deacon’s woodlot. Just Henry’s luck. It was too bad about that fellow--but the devil take him anyway! Perhaps these woods that praised God in their own fashion were tired of belonging to a deacon. So crackle, beautiful flames, be as red as you like, beautiful logs! It will take away from you the taste of the deacon. Henry climbed to the top of the cliff to enjoy the spectacle better; and sitting on a rock he watched the flames leaping for joy, escaping with a hiss from their old prison under the bark, spreading so rapidly that they threatened to surround him, high up as he was--watching with the satisfied eye of an artist. The fire licked the roots of the pines, then sprang with one leap to their tops. The squirrels beat a retreat, the wood-pigeons flew away through the smoke. He heard the alarm-bell in the village. This was a moment worth living. Just before, when he was running to warn the people, Henry had felt rather sheepish; but now a pure joy blazed up in him at this conflagration that seemed to have been decreed by the solitary Nero calmly seated on the top of the rock, enjoying the spectacle while the rescuers were approaching.

For several hours he fought the fire with the others who were dashing about. Result: a hundred acres burned over, including many young trees. He had no reason to feel so proud--or to be astonished at being called a “damned rascal” by those whose woods had suffered. As for the crowd that had rushed up from the village, they seemed to be tacitly grateful to the good-for-nothing who had provided them with this free conflagration to crown their Town-Meeting Day.

After all, if anyone had reason to be grieved, was it not Henry himself, thinking of the beautiful young trees that had been destroyed? He who owned the woods by a different right than the persons who had paid their market-value in mere greenbacks? He who loved them for themselves and not for the number of cords of wood that could be got from them? Walking through the burned woodland alone that night to see if the insurrection had been entirely quelled, the incendiary thought of the fresh shoots that would spring up with new life through the charred surface.

On the spot where they had had their interrupted lunch lay those blessed fish, shamefaced and shrivelled, as if they were the real culprits.