Transcribed from 1904 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk Second proof by Margaret Price
AN INLAND VOYAGE
Contents:
Preface
Antwerp to Boom
On the Willebroek Canal
The Royal Sport Nautique
At Maubeuge
On the Sambre Canalised: to Quartes
Pont-sur-Sambre:
We are Pedlars
The Travelling Merchant
On the Sambre Canalised: to Landrecies
At Landrecies
Sambre and Oise Canal: Canal boats
The Oise in Flood
Origny Sainte-Benoite
A By-day
The Company at Table
Down the Oise: to Moy
La Fere of Cursed Memory
Down the Oise: Through the Golden Valley
Noyon Cathedral
Down the Oise: to Compiegne
At Compiegne
Changed Times
Down the Oise: Church interiors
Precy and the Marionnettes
Back to the world
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
To equip so small a book with a preface is, I am half afraid, to
sin against proportion. But a preface is more than an author can
resist, for it is the reward of his labours. When the foundation
stone is laid, the architect appears with his plans, and struts for
an hour before the public eye. So with the writer in his preface:
he may have never a word to say, but he must show himself for a
moment in the portico, hat in hand, and with an urbane demeanour.
It is best, in such circumstances, to represent a delicate shade of
manner between humility and superiority: as if the book had been
written by some one else, and you had merely run over it and
inserted what was good. But for my part I have not yet learned the
trick to that perfection; I am not yet able to dissemble the warmth
of my sentiments towards a reader; and if I meet him on the
threshold, it is to invite him in with country cordiality.
To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in
proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension. It
occurred to me that I might not only be the first to read these
pages, but the last as well; that I might have pioneered this very
smiling tract of country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow
in my steps. The more I thought, the more I disliked the notion;
until the distaste grew into a sort of panic terror, and I rushed
into this Preface, which is no more than an advertisement for
readers.
What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from
Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces
naught so nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age
when people prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.
I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the
negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain
stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred
pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of
God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made
a better one myself.--I really do not know where my head can have
been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be
man.--'Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically
unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please in
frivolous circles.
To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed
I wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards
him an almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my
reader: --if it were only to follow his own travels alongside of
mine.
R.L.S.
ANTWERP TO BOOM
We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. A stevedore and a lot of
dock porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the
slip. A crowd of children followed cheering. The Cigarette went
off in a splash and a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment
the Arethusa was after her. A steamer was coming down, men on the
paddle-box shouted hoarse warnings, the stevedore and his porters
were bawling from the quay. But in a stroke or two the canoes were
away out in the middle of the Scheldt, and all steamers, and
stevedores, and other 'long-shore vanities were left behind.
The sun shone brightly; the tide was making--four jolly miles an
hour; the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my
part, I had never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my
first experiment out in the middle of this big river was not made
without some trepidation. What would happen when the wind first
caught my little canvas? I suppose it was almost as trying a
venture into the regions of the unknown as to publish a first book,
or to marry. But my doubts were not of long duration; and in five
minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I had tied my
sheet.
I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself; of course,
in company with the rest of my fellow-men, I had always tied the
sheet in a sailing-boat; but in so little and crank a concern as a
canoe, and with these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find
myself follow the same principle; and it inspired me with some
contemptuous views of our regard for life. It is certainly easier
to smoke with the sheet fastened; but I had never before weighed a
comfortable pipe of tobacco against an obvious risk, and gravely
elected for the comfortable pipe. It is a commonplace, that we
cannot answer for ourselves before we have been tried. But it is
not so common a reflection, and surely more consoling, that we
usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better than we
thought. I believe this is every one's experience: but an
apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents
mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish
sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been
some one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger;
to tell me how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and
how the good in a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be
overlaid, and rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need. But
we are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in literature; and
not a man among us will go to the head of the march to sound the
heady drums.
It was agreeable upon the river. A barge or two went past laden
with hay. Reeds and willows bordered the stream; and cattle and
grey venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the
embankment. Here and there was a pleasant village among trees,
with a noisy shipping-yard; here and there a villa in a lawn. The
wind served us well up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel; and
we were running pretty free when we began to sight the brickyards
of Boom, lying for a long way on the right bank of the river. The
left bank was still green and pastoral, with alleys of trees along
the embankment, and here and there a flight of steps to serve a
ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with her elbows on her
knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver spectacles. But
Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with every
minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge over
the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.
Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing:
that the majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that
they can speak English, which is not justified by fact. This gave
a kind of haziness to our intercourse. As for the Hotel de la
Navigation, I think it is the worst feature of the place. It
boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at one end, looking on the
street; and another sanded parlour, darker and colder, with an
empty bird-cage and a tricolour subscription box by way of sole
adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The
food, as usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional
character; indeed I have never been able to detect anything in the
nature of a meal among this pleasing people; they seem to peck and
trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit: tentatively
French, truly German, and somehow falling between the two.
The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the
old piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to
hold its lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer.
The engineer apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor
indeed to the bagman; but talked low and sparingly to one another,
or raked us in the gaslight with a gleam of spectacles. For though
handsome lads, they were all (in the Scots phrase) barnacled.
There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough
out of England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and
all sorts of curious foreign ways, which need not here be
specified. She spoke to us very fluently in her jargon, asked us
information as to the manners of the present day in England, and
obligingly corrected us when we attempted to answer. But as we
were dealing with a woman, perhaps our information was not so much
thrown away as it appeared. The sex likes to pick up knowledge and
yet preserve its superiority. It is good policy, and almost
necessary in the circumstances. If a man finds a woman admire him,
were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at
once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent
snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as
Miss Howe or Miss Harlowe would have said, 'are such ENCROACHERS.'
For my part, I am body and soul with the women; and after a well-
married couple, there is nothing so beautiful in the world as the
myth of the divine huntress. It is no use for a man to take to the
woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and
had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about
some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist among men, that
they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone
without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare,
although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to
women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or
indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so
encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think
of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the
note of Diana's horn; moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as
they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched by the
commotion of man's hot and turbid life--although there are plenty
other ideals that I should prefer--I find my heart beat at the
thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in life, but to fail with what a
grace! That is not lost which is not regretted. And where--here
slips out the male--where would be much of the glory of inspiring
love, if there were no contempt to overcome?
ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL
Next morning, when we set forth on the Willebroek Canal, the rain
began heavy and chill. The water of the canal stood at about the
drinking temperature of tea; and under this cold aspersion, the
surface was covered with steam. The exhilaration of departure, and
the easy motion of the boats under each stroke of the paddles,
supported us through this misfortune while it lasted; and when the
cloud passed and the sun came out again, our spirits went up above
the range of stay-at-home humours. A good breeze rustled and
shivered in the rows of trees that bordered the canal. The leaves
flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous masses. It seemed
sailing weather to eye and ear; but down between the banks, the
wind reached us only in faint and desultory puffs. There was
hardly enough to steer by. Progress was intermittent and
unsatisfactory. A jocular person, of marine antecedents, hailed us
from the tow-path with a 'C'est vite, mais c'est long.'
The canal was busy enough. Every now and then we met or overtook a
long string of boats, with great green tillers; high sterns with a
window on either side of the rudder, and perhaps a jug or a flower-
pot in one of the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman
busied about the day's dinner, and a handful of children. These
barges were all tied one behind the other with tow ropes, to the
number of twenty-five or thirty; and the line was headed and kept
in motion by a steamer of strange construction. It had neither
paddle-wheel nor screw; but by some gear not rightly comprehensible
to the unmechanical mind, it fetched up over its bow a small bright
chain which lay along the bottom of the canal, and paying it out
again over the stern, dragged itself forward, link by link, with
its whole retinue of loaded skows. Until one had found out the key
to the enigma, there was something solemn and uncomfortable in the
progress of one of these trains, as it moved gently along the water
with nothing to mark its advance but an eddy alongside dying away
into the wake.
Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by
far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and
then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill,
sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands: the
most picturesque of things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at
a foot-pace as if there were no such thing as business in the
world; and the man dreaming at the tiller sees the same spire on
the horizon all day long. It is a mystery how things ever get to
their destination at this rate; and to see the barges waiting their
turn at a lock, affords a fine lesson of how easily the world may
be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board, for
such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.
The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the
canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge
floats by great forests and through great cities with their public
buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his
floating home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were
listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a
picture-book in which he had no concern. He may take his afternoon
walk in some foreign country on the banks of the canal, and then
come home to dinner at his own fireside.
There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of
health; but a high measure of health is only necessary for
unhealthy people. The slug of a fellow, who is never ill nor well,
has a quiet time of it in life, and dies all the easier.
I am sure I would rather be a bargee than occupy any position under
heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few
callings, I should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in
return for regular meals. The bargee is on shipboard--he is master
in his own ship--he can land whenever he will--he can never be kept
beating off a lee-shore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as
hard as iron; and so far as I can make out, time stands as nearly
still with him as is compatible with the return of bed-time or the
dinner-hour. It is not easy to see why a bargee should ever die.
Half-way between Willebroek and Villevorde, in a beautiful reach of
canal like a squire's avenue, we went ashore to lunch. There were
two eggs, a junk of bread, and a bottle of wine on board the
Arethusa; and two eggs and an Etna cooking apparatus on board the
Cigarette. The master of the latter boat smashed one of the eggs
in the course of disembarkation; but observing pleasantly that it
might still be cooked a la papier, he dropped it into the Etna, in
its covering of Flemish newspaper. We landed in a blink of fine
weather; but we had not been two minutes ashore before the wind
freshened into half a gale, and the rain began to patter on our
shoulders. We sat as close about the Etna as we could. The
spirits burned with great ostentation; the grass caught flame every
minute or two, and had to be trodden out; and before long, there
were several burnt fingers of the party. But the solid quantity of
cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display;
and when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound
egg was little more than loo-warm; and as for a la papier, it was a
cold and sordid fricassee of printer's ink and broken egg-shell.
We made shift to roast the other two, by putting them close to the
burning spirits; and that with better success. And then we
uncorked the bottle of wine, and sat down in a ditch with our canoe
aprons over our knees. It rained smartly. Discomfort, when it is
honestly uncomfortable and makes no nauseous pretensions to the
contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and people well steeped
and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for laughter.
From this point of view, even egg a la papier offered by way of
food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun. But this
manner of jest, although it may be taken in good part, does not
invite repetition; and from that time forward, the Etna voyaged
like a gentleman in the locker of the Cigarette.
It is almost unnecessary to mention that when lunch was over and we
got aboard again and made sail, the wind promptly died away. The
rest of the journey to Villevorde, we still spread our canvas to
the unfavouring air; and with now and then a puff, and now and then
a spell of paddling, drifted along from lock to lock, between the
orderly trees.
It was a fine, green, fat landscape; or rather a mere green water-
lane, going on from village to village. Things had a settled look,
as in places long lived in. Crop-headed children spat upon us from
the bridges as we went below, with a true conservative feeling.
But even more conservative were the fishermen, intent upon their
floats, who let us go by without one glance. They perched upon
sterlings and buttresses and along the slope of the embankment,
gently occupied. They were indifferent, like pieces of dead
nature. They did not move any more than if they had been fishing
in an old Dutch print. The leaves fluttered, the water lapped, but
they continued in one stay like so many churches established by
law. You might have trepanned every one of their innocent heads,
and found no more than so much coiled fishing-line below their
skulls. I do not care for your stalwart fellows in india-rubber
stockings breasting up mountain torrents with a salmon rod; but I
do dearly love the class of man who plies his unfruitful art, for
ever and a day, by still and depopulated waters.
At the last lock, just beyond Villevorde, there was a lock-mistress
who spoke French comprehensibly, and told us we were still a couple
of leagues from Brussels. At the same place, the rain began again.
It fell in straight, parallel lines; and the surface of the canal
was thrown up into an infinity of little crystal fountains. There
were no beds to be had in the neighbourhood. Nothing for it but to
lay the sails aside and address ourselves to steady paddling in the
rain.
Beautiful country houses, with clocks and long lines of shuttered
windows, and fine old trees standing in groves and avenues, gave a
rich and sombre aspect in the rain and the deepening dusk to the
shores of the canal. I seem to have seen something of the same
effect in engravings: opulent landscapes, deserted and overhung
with the passage of storm. And throughout we had the escort of a
hooded cart, which trotted shabbily along the tow-path, and kept at
an almost uniform distance in our wake.
THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE
The rain took off near Laeken. But the sun was already down; the
air was chill; and we had scarcely a dry stitch between the pair of
us. Nay, now we found ourselves near the end of the Allee Verte,
and on the very threshold of Brussels, we were confronted by a
serious difficulty. The shores were closely lined by canal boats
waiting their turn at the lock. Nowhere was there any convenient
landing-place; nowhere so much as a stable-yard to leave the canoes
in for the night. We scrambled ashore and entered an estaminet
where some sorry fellows were drinking with the landlord. The
landlord was pretty round with us; he knew of no coach-house or
stable-yard, nothing of the sort; and seeing we had come with no
mind to drink, he did not conceal his impatience to be rid of us.
One of the sorry fellows came to the rescue. Somewhere in the
corner of the basin there was a slip, he informed us, and something
else besides, not very clearly defined by him, but hopefully
construed by his hearers.
Sure enough there was the slip in the corner of the basin; and at
the top of it two nice-looking lads in boating clothes. The
Arethusa addressed himself to these. One of them said there would
be no difficulty about a night's lodging for our boats; and the
other, taking a cigarette from his lips, inquired if they were made
by Searle and Son. The name was quite an introduction. Half-a-
dozen other young men came out of a boat-house bearing the
superscription ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE, and joined in the talk. They
were all very polite, voluble, and enthusiastic; and their
discourse was interlarded with English boating terms, and the names
of English boat-builders and English clubs. I do not know, to my
shame, any spot in my native land where I should have been so
warmly received by the same number of people. We were English
boating-men, and the Belgian boating-men fell upon our necks. I
wonder if French Huguenots were as cordially greeted by English
Protestants when they came across the Channel out of great
tribulation. But after all, what religion knits people so closely
as a common sport?
The canoes were carried into the boat-house; they were washed down
for us by the Club servants, the sails were hung out to dry, and
everything made as snug and tidy as a picture. And in the
meanwhile we were led upstairs by our new-found brethren, for so
more than one of them stated the relationship, and made free of
their lavatory. This one lent us soap, that one a towel, a third
and fourth helped us to undo our bags. And all the time such
questions, such assurances of respect and sympathy! I declare I
never knew what glory was before.
'Yes, yes, the Royal Sport Nautique is the oldest club in Belgium.'
'We number two hundred.'
'We'--this is not a substantive speech, but an abstract of many
speeches, the impression left upon my mind after a great deal of
talk; and very youthful, pleasant, natural, and patriotic it seems
to me to be--'We have gained all races, except those where we were
cheated by the French.'
'You must leave all your wet things to be dried.'
'O! entre freres! In any boat-house in England we should find the
same.' (I cordially hope they might.)
'En Angleterre, vous employez des sliding-seats, n'est-ce pas?'
'We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the
evening, voyez-vous, nous sommes serieux.'
These were the words. They were all employed over the frivolous
mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day; but in the evening
they found some hours for the serious concerns of life. I may have
a wrong idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very wise remark.
People connected with literature and philosophy are busy all their
days in getting rid of second-hand notions and false standards. It
is their profession, in the sweat of their brows, by dogged
thinking, to recover their old fresh view of life, and distinguish
what they really and originally like, from what they have only
learned to tolerate perforce. And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen
had the distinction still quite legible in their hearts. They had
still those clean perceptions of what is nice and nasty, what is
interesting and what is dull, which envious old gentlemen refer to
as illusions. The nightmare illusion of middle age, the bear's hug
of custom gradually squeezing the life out of a man's soul, had not
yet begun for these happy-starred young Belgians. They still knew
that the interest they took in their business was a trifling affair
compared to their spontaneous, long-suffering affection for
nautical sports. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying
Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have
kept your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; he may be honest
in something more than the commercial sense; he may love his
friends with an elective, personal sympathy, and not accept them as
an adjunct of the station to which he has been called. He may be a
man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his own
shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the social
engine-house, welded on principles that he does not understand, and
for purposes that he does not care for.
For will any one dare to tell me that business is more entertaining
than fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never
seen an office, who says so. And for certain the one is a great
deal better for the health. There should be nothing so much a
man's business as his amusements. Nothing but money-grubbing can
be put forward to the contrary; no one but
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven,
durst risk a word in answer. It is but a lying cant that would
represent the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly
toiling for mankind, and then most useful when they are most
absorbed in their transactions; for the man is more important than
his services. And when my Royal Nautical Sportsman shall have so
far fallen from his hopeful youth that he cannot pluck up an
enthusiasm over anything but his ledger, I venture to doubt whether
he will be near so nice a fellow, and whether he would welcome,
with so good a grace, a couple of drenched Englishmen paddling into
Brussels in the dusk.
When we had changed our wet clothes and drunk a glass of pale ale
to the Club's prosperity, one of their number escorted us to an
hotel. He would not join us at our dinner, but he had no objection
to a glass of wine. Enthusiasm is very wearing; and I begin to
understand why prophets were unpopular in Judaea, where they were
best known. For three stricken hours did this excellent young man
sit beside us to dilate on boats and boat-races; and before he
left, he was kind enough to order our bedroom candles.
We endeavoured now and again to change the subject; but the
diversion did not last a moment: the Royal Nautical Sportsman
bridled, shied, answered the question, and then breasted once more
into the swelling tide of his subject. I call it his subject; but
I think it was he who was subjected. The Arethusa, who holds all
racing as a creature of the devil, found himself in a pitiful
dilemma. He durst not own his ignorance for the honour of Old
England, and spoke away about English clubs and English oarsmen
whose fame had never before come to his ears. Several times, and,
once above all, on the question of sliding-seats, he was within an
ace of exposure. As for the Cigarette, who has rowed races in the
heat of his blood, but now disowns these slips of his wanton youth,
his case was still more desperate; for the Royal Nautical proposed
that he should take an oar in one of their eights on the morrow, to
compare the English with the Belgian stroke. I could see my friend
perspiring in his chair whenever that particular topic came up.
And there was yet another proposal which had the same effect on
both of us. It appeared that the champion canoeist of Europe (as
well as most other champions) was a Royal Nautical Sportsman. And
if we would only wait until the Sunday, this infernal paddler would
be so condescending as to accompany us on our next stage. Neither
of us had the least desire to drive the coursers of the sun against
Apollo.
When the young man was gone, we countermanded our candles, and
ordered some brandy and water. The great billows had gone over our
head. The Royal Nautical Sportsmen were as nice young fellows as a
man would wish to see, but they were a trifle too young and a
thought too nautical for us. We began to see that we were old and
cynical; we liked ease and the agreeable rambling of the human mind
about this and the other subject; we did not want to disgrace our
native land by messing an eight, or toiling pitifully in the wake
of the champion canoeist. In short, we had recourse to flight. It
seemed ungrateful, but we tried to make that good on a card loaded
with sincere compliments. And indeed it was no time for scruples;
we seemed to feel the hot breath of the champion on our necks.
AT MAUBEUGE
Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal
Nauticals, partly from the fact that there were no fewer than
fifty-five locks between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded that
we should travel by train across the frontier, boats and all.
Fifty-five locks in a day's journey was pretty well tantamount to
trudging the whole distance on foot, with the canoes upon our
shoulders, an object of astonishment to the trees on the canal
side, and of honest derision to all right-thinking children.
To pass the frontier, even in a train, is a difficult matter for
the Arethusa. He is somehow or other a marked man for the official
eye. Wherever he journeys, there are the officers gathered
together. Treaties are solemnly signed, foreign ministers,
ambassadors, and consuls sit throned in state from China to Peru,
and the Union Jack flutters on all the winds of heaven. Under
these safeguards, portly clergymen, school-mistresses, gentlemen in
grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British touristry
pour unhindered, Murray in hand, over the railways of the
Continent, and yet the slim person of the Arethusa is taken in the
meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing. If he
travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about
the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he
is suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been
humiliated by a general incredulity. He is a born British subject,
yet he has never succeeded in persuading a single official of his
nationality. He flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he
is rarely taken for anything better than a spy, and there is no
absurd and disreputable means of livelihood but has been attributed
to him in some heat of official or popular distrust. . . .
For the life of me I cannot understand it. I too have been knolled
to church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it.
I am as strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I
might come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from where
I do. My ancestors have laboured in vain, and the glorious
Constitution cannot protect me in my walks abroad. It is a great
thing, believe me, to present a good normal type of the nation you
belong to.
Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I
was; and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last
between accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the
train. I was sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.
Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the Grand Cerf.
It seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at
least, these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We
had to stay there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to
follow us, and at last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until
we went back to liberate them. There was nothing to do, nothing to
see. We had good meals, which was a great matter; but that was
all.
The Cigarette was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelessly incapable. And
besides, as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the
other's fortified places already, these precautions are of the
nature of shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I
have no doubt they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a
great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or
other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the
Freemasons, who have been shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of
pride; and not a grocer among them, however honest, harmless, and
empty-headed he may feel himself to be at bottom, but comes home
from one of their coenacula with a portentous significance for
himself.
It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can
live in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the
spectacle of a whole life in which you have no part paralyses
personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. The
baker stands in his door; the colonel with his three medals goes by
to the cafe at night; the troops drum and trumpet and man the
ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It would task language to say
how placidly you behold all this. In a place where you have taken
some root, you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a
hand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But in
a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so
large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far
apart from the business, that you positively forget it would be
possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around
you, that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a
very short time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into
a wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on every
side; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up their
abode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much of
humanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the stale
externals of man's life. These externals are as dead to us as so
many formalities, and speak a dead language in our eyes and ears.
They have no more meaning than an oath or a salutation. We are so
much accustomed to see married couples going to church of a Sunday
that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and novelists are
driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish to show us
what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live for each
other.
One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his
outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough
looking little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark of
something human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey,
and came to me at once in envious sympathy. How he longed to
travel! he told me. How he longed to be somewhere else, and see
the round world before he went into the grave! 'Here I am,' said
he. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again
to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My God,
is that life?' I could not say I thought it was--for him. He
pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go;
and as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed. Might not this
have been a brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after
Drake? But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men.
He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has
the wealth and glory.
I wonder if my friend is still driving the omnibus for the Grand
Cerf? Not very likely, I believe; for I think he was on the eve of
mutiny when we passed through, and perhaps our passage determined
him for good. Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp,
and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and sleep under trees, and
see the dawn and the sunset every day above a new horizon. I think
I hear you say that it is a respectable position to drive an
omnibus? Very well. What right has he who likes it not, to keep
those who would like it dearly out of this respectable position?
Suppose a dish were not to my taste, and you told me that it was a
favourite amongst the rest of the company, what should I conclude
from that? Not to finish the dish against my stomach, I suppose.
Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not
rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment
venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will
go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind,
uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it
were as respectable as the Church of England, the sooner a man is
out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.
ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED
TO QUARTES
About three in the afternoon the whole establishment of the Grand
Cerf accompanied us to the water's edge. The man of the omnibus
was there with haggard eyes. Poor cage-bird! Do I not remember
the time when I myself haunted the station, to watch train after
train carry its complement of freemen into the night, and read the
names of distant places on the time-bills with indescribable
longings?
We were not clear of the fortifications before the rain began. The
wind was contrary, and blew in furious gusts; nor were the aspects
of nature any more clement than the doings of the sky. For we
passed through a stretch of blighted country, sparsely covered with
brush, but handsomely enough diversified with factory chimneys. We
landed in a soiled meadow among some pollards, and there smoked a
pipe in a flaw of fair weather. But the wind blew so hard, we
could get little else to smoke. There were no natural objects in
the neighbourhood, but some sordid workshops. A group of children
headed by a tall girl stood and watched us from a little distance
all the time we stayed. I heartily wonder what they thought of us.
At Hautmont, the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place
being steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a
dozen grimy workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and,
what is much better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any
sense of insult. 'It is a way we have in our countryside,' said
they. And a very becoming way it is. In Scotland, where also you
will get services for nothing, the good people reject your money as
if you had been trying to corrupt a voter. When people take the
trouble to do dignified acts, it is worth while to take a little
more, and allow the dignity to be common to all concerned. But in
our brave Saxon countries, where we plod threescore years and ten
in the mud, and the wind keeps singing in our ears from birth to
burial, we do our good and bad with a high hand and almost
offensively; and make even our alms a witness-bearing and an act of
war against the wrong.
After Hautmont, the sun came forth again and the wind went down;
and a little paddling took us beyond the ironworks and through a
delectable land. The river wound among low hills, so that
sometimes the sun was at our backs, and sometimes it stood right
ahead, and the river before us was one sheet of intolerable glory.
On either hand, meadows and orchards bordered, with a margin of
sedge and water flowers, upon the river. The hedges were of great
height, woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms; and the fields, as
they were often very small, looked like a series of bowers along
the stream. There was never any prospect; sometimes a hill-top
with its trees would look over the nearest hedgerow, just to make a
middle distance for the sky; but that was all. The heaven was bare
of clouds. The atmosphere, after the rain, was of enchanting
purity. The river doubled among the hillocks, a shining strip of
mirror glass; and the dip of the paddles set the flowers shaking
along the brink.
In the meadows wandered black and white cattle fantastically
marked. One beast, with a white head and the rest of the body
glossy black, came to the edge to drink, and stood gravely
twitching his ears at me as I went by, like some sort of
preposterous clergyman in a play. A moment after I heard a loud
plunge, and, turning my head, saw the clergyman struggling to
shore. The bank had given way under his feet.
Besides the cattle, we saw no living things except a few birds and
a great many fishermen. These sat along the edges of the meadows,
sometimes with one rod, sometimes with as many as half a score.
They seemed stupefied with contentment; and when we induced them to
exchange a few words with us about the weather, their voices
sounded quiet and far away. There was a strange diversity of
opinion among them as to the kind of fish for which they set their
lures; although they were all agreed in this, that the river was
abundantly supplied. Where it was plain that no two of them had
ever caught the same kind of fish, we could not help suspecting
that perhaps not any one of them had ever caught a fish at all. I
hope, since the afternoon was so lovely, that they were one and all
rewarded; and that a silver booty went home in every basket for the
pot. Some of my friends would cry shame on me for this; but I
prefer a man, were he only an angler, to the bravest pair of gills
in all God's waters. I do not affect fishes unless when cooked in
sauce; whereas an angler is an important piece of river scenery,
and hence deserves some recognition among canoeists. He can always
tell you where you are after a mild fashion; and his quiet presence
serves to accentuate the solitude and stillness, and remind you of
the glittering citizens below your boat.
The Sambre turned so industriously to and fro among his little
hills, that it was past six before we drew near the lock at
Quartes. There were some children on the tow-path, with whom the
Cigarette fell into a chaffing talk as they ran along beside us.
It was in vain that I warned him. In vain I told him, in English,
that boys were the most dangerous creatures; and if once you began
with them, it was safe to end in a shower of stones. For my own
part, whenever anything was addressed to me, I smiled gently and
shook my head as though I were an inoffensive person inadequately
acquainted with French. For indeed I have had such experience at
home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a troop of
healthy urchins.
But I was doing injustice to these peaceable young Hainaulters.
When the Cigarette went off to make inquiries, I got out upon the
bank to smoke a pipe and superintend the boats, and became at once
the centre of much amiable curiosity. The children had been joined
by this time by a young woman and a mild lad who had lost an arm;
and this gave me more security. When I let slip my first word or
so in French, a little girl nodded her head with a comical grown-up
air. 'Ah, you see,' she said, 'he understands well enough now; he
was just making believe.' And the little group laughed together
very good-naturedly.
They were much impressed when they heard we came from England; and
the little girl proffered the information that England was an
island 'and a far way from here--bien loin d'ici.'
'Ay, you may say that, a far way from here,' said the lad with one
arm.
I was as nearly home-sick as ever I was in my life; they seemed to
make it such an incalculable distance to the place where I first
saw the day. They admired the canoes very much. And I observed
one piece of delicacy in these children, which is worthy of record.
They had been deafening us for the last hundred yards with
petitions for a sail; ay, and they deafened us to the same tune
next morning when we came to start; but then, when the canoes were
lying empty, there was no word of any such petition. Delicacy? or
perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a vessel? I hate
cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless perhaps the
two were the same thing? And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold tub
and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life
in cases of advanced sensibility.
From the boats they turned to my costume. They could not make
enough of my red sash; and my knife filled them with awe.
'They make them like that in England,' said the boy with one arm.
I was glad he did not know how badly we make them in England now-a-
days. 'They are for people who go away to sea,' he added, 'and to
defend one's life against great fish.'
I felt I was becoming a more and more romantic figure to the little
group at every word. And so I suppose I was. Even my pipe,
although it was an ordinary French clay pretty well 'trousered,' as
they call it, would have a rarity in their eyes, as a thing coming
from so far away. And if my feathers were not very fine in
themselves, they were all from over seas. One thing in my outfit,
however, tickled them out of all politeness; and that was the
bemired condition of my canvas shoes. I suppose they were sure the
mud at any rate was a home product. The little girl (who was the
genius of the party) displayed her own sabots in competition; and I
wish you could have seen how gracefully and merrily she did it.
The young woman's milk-can, a great amphora of hammered brass,
stood some way off upon the sward. I was glad of an opportunity to
divert public attention from myself, and return some of the
compliments I had received. So I admired it cordially both for
form and colour, telling them, and very truly, that it was as
beautiful as gold. They were not surprised. The things were
plainly the boast of the countryside. And the children expatiated
on the costliness of these amphorae, which sell sometimes as high
as thirty francs apiece; told me how they were carried on donkeys,
one on either side of the saddle, a brave caparison in themselves;
and how they were to be seen all over the district, and at the
larger farms in great number and of great size.
PONT-SUR-SAMBRE
WE ARE PEDLARS
The Cigarette returned with good news. There were beds to be had
some ten minutes' walk from where we were, at a place called Pont.
We stowed the canoes in a granary, and asked among the children for
a guide. The circle at once widened round us, and our offers of
reward were received in dispiriting silence. We were plainly a
pair of Bluebeards to the children; they might speak to us in
public places, and where they had the advantage of numbers; but it
was another thing to venture off alone with two uncouth and
legendary characters, who had dropped from the clouds upon their
hamlet this quiet afternoon, sashed and be-knived, and with a
flavour of great voyages. The owner of the granary came to our
assistance, singled out one little fellow and threatened him with
corporalities; or I suspect we should have had to find the way for
ourselves. As it was, he was more frightened at the granary man
than the strangers, having perhaps had some experience of the
former. But I fancy his little heart must have been going at a
fine rate; for he kept trotting at a respectful distance in front,
and looking back at us with scared eyes. Not otherwise may the
children of the young world have guided Jove or one of his Olympian
compeers on an adventure.
A miry lane led us up from Quartes with its church and bickering
windmill. The hinds were trudging homewards from the fields. A
brisk little woman passed us by. She was seated across a donkey
between a pair of glittering milk-cans; and, as she went, she
kicked jauntily with her heels upon the donkey's side, and
scattered shrill remarks among the wayfarers. It was notable that
none of the tired men took the trouble to reply. Our conductor
soon led us out of the lane and across country. The sun had gone
down, but the west in front of us was one lake of level gold. The
path wandered a while in the open, and then passed under a trellis
like a bower indefinitely prolonged. On either hand were shadowy
orchards; cottages lay low among the leaves, and sent their smoke
to heaven; every here and there, in an opening, appeared the great
gold face of the west.
I never saw the Cigarette in such an idyllic frame of mind. He
waxed positively lyrical in praise of country scenes. I was little
less exhilarated myself; the mild air of the evening, the shadows,
the rich lights and the silence, made a symphonious accompaniment
about our walk; and we both determined to avoid towns for the
future and sleep in hamlets.
At last the path went between two houses, and turned the party out
into a wide muddy high-road, bordered, as far as the eye could
reach on either hand, by an unsightly village. The houses stood
well back, leaving a ribbon of waste land on either side of the
road, where there were stacks of firewood, carts, barrows, rubbish-
heaps, and a little doubtful grass. Away on the left, a gaunt
tower stood in the middle of the street. What it had been in past
ages, I know not: probably a hold in time of war; but now-a-days
it bore an illegible dial-plate in its upper parts, and near the
bottom an iron letter-box.
The inn to which we had been recommended at Quartes was full, or
else the landlady did not like our looks. I ought to say, that
with our long, damp india-rubber bags, we presented rather a
doubtful type of civilisation: like rag-and-bone men, the
Cigarette imagined. 'These gentlemen are pedlars?--Ces messieurs
sont des marchands?'--asked the landlady. And then, without
waiting for an answer, which I suppose she thought superfluous in
so plain a case, recommended us to a butcher who lived hard by the
tower, and took in travellers to lodge.
Thither went we. But the butcher was flitting, and all his beds
were taken down. Or else he didn't like our look. As a parting
shot, we had 'These gentlemen are pedlars?'
It began to grow dark in earnest. We could no longer distinguish
the faces of the people who passed us by with an inarticulate good-
evening. And the householders of Pont seemed very economical with
their oil; for we saw not a single window lighted in all that long
village. I believe it is the longest village in the world; but I
daresay in our predicament every pace counted three times over. We
were much cast down when we came to the last auberge; and looking
in at the dark door, asked timidly if we could sleep there for the
night. A female voice assented in no very friendly tones. We
clapped the bags down and found our way to chairs.
The place was in total darkness, save a red glow in the chinks and
ventilators of the stove. But now the landlady lit a lamp to see
her new guests; I suppose the darkness was what saved us another
expulsion; for I cannot say she looked gratified at our appearance.
We were in a large bare apartment, adorned with two allegorical
prints of Music and Painting, and a copy of the law against public
drunkenness. On one side, there was a bit of a bar, with some
half-a-dozen bottles. Two labourers sat waiting supper, in
attitudes of extreme weariness; a plain-looking lass bustled about
with a sleepy child of two; and the landlady began to derange the
pots upon the stove, and set some beefsteak to grill.
