VII


These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good 
conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day.  Many of 
us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a 
portion of our souls behind us buried in the woods.  I would not 
dig for these reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that 
will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below 
great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of youth's 
dynamite and dear remembrances.  And as one generation passes on 
and renovates the field of tillage for the next, I entertain a 
fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth into the forest 
they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their 
predecessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that are the 
sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the 
field of trees.  Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer 
farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves, 
surely in Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions?  
We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our 
delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a 
legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this 
memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital 
memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life 
richer, but poorer also.  The forest, indeed, they have possessed, 
from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, and they will 
return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and 
use it for ever in their books and pictures.  Yet when they made 
their packets, and put up their notes and sketches, something, it 
should seem, had been forgotten.  A projection of themselves shall 
appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a natural 
child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares.  Over the whole 
field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like 
indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all 
beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously 
unwilling to forget their orphanage.  If anywhere about that wood 
you meet my airy bantling, greet him with tenderness.  He was a 
pleasant lad, though now abandoned.  And when it comes to your own 
turn to quit the forest, may you leave behind you such another; no 
Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as 
becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure, 
the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that 
has not been mirthfully conceived.

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket 
and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of 
enjoyment.  Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to 
Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to the spirit 
of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from studies, 
although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the 
gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo 
the evil of his sketches.  A spirit once well strung up to the 
concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to 
finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture.  The 
incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which 
we test the flatness of our art.  Here it is that Nature teaches 
and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure.  
Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid 
works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less 
shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions.  In all 
sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling 
human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio 
pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt.  Let the young 
painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with 
studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him 
walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and 
botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature.  So he will learn - or 
learn not to forget - the poetry of life and earth, which, when he 
has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

[1882.]



CHAPTER IV - EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE"



THE country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the 
Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people.  The 
weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the 
rain fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun 
fervent, the air vigorous and pure.  They walked separate:  the 
Cigarette plodding behind with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa 
posting on ahead.  Thus each enjoyed his own reflections by the 
way; each had perhaps time to tire of them before he met his 
comrade at the designated inn; and the pleasures of society and 
solitude combined to fill the day.  The Arethusa carried in his 
knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the 
hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels.  In this 
path, he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley, 
and all contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons, he will be 
the last to publish the result.  The Cigarette walked burthened 
with a volume of Michelet.  And both these books, it will be seen, 
played a part in the subsequent adventure.

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed.  He is no precisian in attire; 
but by all accounts, he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; 
having set forth indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most 
unfashionable spot in Europe, Barbizon.  On his head he wore a 
smoking-cap of Indian work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and 
tarnished.  A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the 
satirical called black; a light tweed coat made by a good English 
tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters 
completed his array.  In person, he is exceptionally lean; and his 
face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.  For 
years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without 
suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked 
askance upon him; and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he 
is actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo.  If you 
will imagine him, dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, 
walking nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made 
trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking 
eagerly round him as if in terror of pursuit - the figure, when 
realised, is far from reassuring.  When Villon journeyed (perhaps 
by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder 
if he had not something of the same appearance.  Something of the 
same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too must have 
tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his successor.  
And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the same 
nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the 
stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild 
bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare inn-
chamber - the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue 
of noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves - and above all, if 
he had anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a 
relish for what he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he 
bathed in, and the rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates 
to-day with the poor exile, and count myself a gainer.

But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, 
for which the Arethusa was to pay dear:  both were gone upon in 
days of incomplete security.  It was not long after the Franco-
Prussian war.  Swiftly as men forget, that country-side was still 
alive with tales of uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth 
'scapes from the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary 
friendships between invader and invaded.  A year, at the most two 
years later, you might have tramped all that country over and not 
heard one anecdote.  And a year or two later, you would - if you 
were a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript array - have 
gone your rounds in greater safety; for along with more interesting 
matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded from men's 
imaginations.

For all that, our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he 
was conscious of arousing wonder.  On the road between that place 
and Chatillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman; 
they fell together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but 
through one and all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and 
his eyes were faithful to the Arethusa's knapsack.  At last, with 
mysterious roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being 
answered, shook his head with kindly incredulity.  "NON," said he, 
"NON, VOUS AVEZ DES PORTRAITS."  And then with a languishing 
appeal, "VOYONS, show me the portraits!"  It was some little while 
before the Arethusa, with a shout of laughter, recognised his 
drift.  By portraits he meant indecent photographs; and in the 
Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he thought to have 
identified a pornographic colporteur.  When countryfolk in France 
have made up their minds as to a person's calling, argument is 
fruitless.  Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and 
fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now he would 
upbraid, now he would reason - "VOYONS, I will tell nobody"; then 
he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine; 
and, at last when their ways separated - "NON," said he, "CE N'EST 
PAS BIEN DE VOTRE PART.  O NON, CE N'EST PAS BIEN."  And shaking 
his head with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed 
unrefreshed.

On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at 
Chatillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Chatillon, 
of grislier memory, looms too near at hand.  But the next day, in a 
certain hamlet called La Jussiere, he stopped to drink a glass of 
syrup in a very poor, bare drinking shop.  The hostess, a comely 
woman, suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly and 
pitying eyes.  "You are not of this department?" she asked.  The 
Arethusa told her he was English.  "Ah!" she said, surprised.  "We 
have no English.  We have many Italians, however, and they do very 
well; they do not complain of the people of hereabouts.  An 
Englishman may do very well also; it will be something new."  Here 
was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa pondered as he drank his 
grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the light 
came upon him in a flash.  "O, POUR VOUS," replied the landlady,  
"a halfpenny!"  POUR VOUS?  By heaven, she took him for a beggar!  
He paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct 
her.  But when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in 
spirit.  The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow; 
and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed 
the river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short 
stage through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Chatillon-
sur-Loire.  It was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang 
with the report of firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen.  
Overhead the birds were in consternation, wheeling in clouds, 
settling and re-arising.  And yet with all this bustle on either 
hand, the road itself lay solitary.  The Arethusa smoked a pipe 
beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down very exactly all he 
was to do at Chatillon:  how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to 
change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime 
inaction, by the margin of the Loire.  Fired by these ideas, he 
pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon 
and in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town.  
Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.

"MONSIEUR EST VOYAGEUR?" he asked.

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile 
attire, replied - I had almost said with gaiety:  "So it would 
appear."

 "His papers are in order?" said the gendarme.  And when the 
Arethusa, with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he 
was informed (politely enough) that he must appear before the 
Commissary.

The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt 
and trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned 
upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like 
Bardolph's) "all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been 
prepared for grief.  Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat 
and fretful at the interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument 
could reach.

THE COMMISSARY.  You have no papers?

THE ARETHUSA.  Not here.

THE COMMISSARY.  Why?

THE ARETHUSA.  I have left them behind in my valise.

THE COMMISSARY.  You know, however, that it is forbidden to 
circulate without papers?

THE ARETHUSA.  Pardon me:  I am convinced of the contrary.  I am 
here on my rights as an English subject by international treaty.

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SCORN).  You call yourself an Englishman?

THE ARETHUSA.  I do.

THE COMMISSARY.  Humph. - What is your trade?

THE ARETHUSA.  I am a Scotch advocate.

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SINGULAR ANNOYANCE).  A Scotch advocate!  Do 
you then pretend to support yourself by that in this department?

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension.  The Commissary 
had scored a point.

THE COMMISSARY.  Why, then, do you travel?

THE ARETHUSA.  I travel for pleasure.

THE COMMISSARY (POINTING TO THE KNAPSACK, AND WITH SUBLIME 
INCREDULITY).  AVEC CA?  VOYEZ-VOUS, JE SUIS UN HOMME INTELLIGENT!  
(With that?  Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)

The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary 
relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the 
postman, but with what different expectations!) to see the contents 
of the knapsack.  And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake 
to his position, fell into a grave mistake.  There was little or no 
furniture in the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and 
to facilitate matters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on 
earth) leant the knapsack on a corner of the bed.  The Commissary 
fairly bounded from his seat; his face and neck flushed past 
purple, almost into blue; and he screamed to lay the desecrating 
object on the floor.

The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of 
socks, and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of 
soap in one of the shoes, two volumes of the COLLECTION JANNET 
lettered POESIES DE CHARLES D'ORLEANS, a map, and a version book 
containing divers notes in prose and the remarkable English 
roundels of the voyager, still to this day unpublished:  the 
Commissary of Chatillon is the only living man who has clapped an 
eye on these artistic trifles.  He turned the assortment over with 
a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he 
regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of 
infection.  Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, 
nothing really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of 
Orleans, to the ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as 
a certificate; and it was supposed the farce was nearly over.

The inquisitor resumed his seat.

THE COMMISSARY (AFTER A PAUSE).  EH BIEN, JE VAIS VOUS DIRE CE QUE 
VOUS ETES.  VOUS ETES ALLEMAND ET VOUS VENEZ CHANTER A LA FOIRE.  
(Well, then, I will tell you what you are.  You are a German and 
have come to sing at the fair.)

THE ARETHUSA.  Would you like to hear me sing?  I believe I could 
convince you of the contrary.

THE COMMISSARY.  PAS DE PLAISANTERIE, MONSIEUR!

THE ARETHUSA.  Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this 
book.  Here, I open it with my eyes shut.  Read one of these songs 
- read this one - and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, 
if it would be possible to sing it at a fair?

THE COMMISSARY (CRITICALLY).  MAIS OUI.  TRES BIEN.

THE ARETHUSA.  COMMENT, MONSIEUR!  What!  But do you not observe it 
is antique.  It is difficult to understand, even for you and me; 
but for the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

THE COMMISSARY (TAKING A PEN).  ENFIN, IL FAUI EN FINIR.  What is 
your name?

THE ARETHUSA (SPEAKING WITH THE SWALLOWING VIVACITY OF THE 
ENGLISH).  Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n.

THE COMMISSARY (AGHAST).  HE!  QUOI?

THE ARETHUSA (PERCEIVING AND IMPROVING HIS ADVANTAGE).  Rob'rt-
Lou's-Stev'ns'n.

THE COMMISSARY (AFTER SEVERAL CONFLICTS WITH HIS PEN).  EH BIEN, IL 
FAUT SE PASSER DU NOM.  CA NE S'ECRIT PAS.  (Well, we must do 
without the name:  it is unspellable.)

The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in 
which I have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the 
Commissary; but the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his 
rising anger, has left but little definite in the memory of the 
Arethusa.  The Commissary was not, I think, a practised literary 
man; no sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand and embarked on 
the composition of the PROCES-VERBAL, than he became distinctly 
more uncivil and began to show a predilection for that simplest of 
all forms of repartee:  "You lie!"  Several times the Arethusa let 
it pass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more 
insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do 
his worst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly 
repent it.  Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first, 
instead of beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going 
on to argue, the thing might have turned otherwise; for even at 
this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly staggered.  But it 
was too late; he had been challenged the PROCES-VERBAL was begun; 
and he again squared his elbows over his writing, and the Arethusa 
was led forth a prisoner.

A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie.  Thither was 
our unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth 
the contents of his pockets.  A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a 
pipe and tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change:  that was 
all.  Not a file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to 
identify or to condemn.  The very gendarme was appalled before such 
destitution.

"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are 
no VOYOU."  And he promised him every indulgence.

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe.  That he was 
told was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco.  
He did not chew, however, and asked instead to have his 
handkerchief.

"NON," said the gendarme.  "NOUS AVONS EU DES HISTOIRES DE GENS QUI 
SE SONT PENDUS."  (No, we have had histories of people who hanged 
themselves.)

"What," cried the Arethusa.  "And is it for that you refuse me my 
handkerchief?  But see how much more easily I could hang myself in 
my trousers!"

The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck to his 
colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.

"At least," said the Arethusa, "be sure that you arrest my comrade; 
he will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him 
by the sack upon his shoulders."

This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of 
the building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the 
stair, and bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending 
person.

The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to 
suppose itself prepared for any mortal accident.  Prison, among 
other ills, was one that had been often faced by the undaunted 
Arethusa.  Even as he went down the stairs, he was telling himself 
that here was a famous occasion for a roundel, and that like the 
committed linnets of the tuneful cavalier, he too would make his 
prison musical.  I will tell the truth at once:  the roundel was 
never written, or it should be printed in this place, to raise a 
smile.  Two reasons interfered:  the first moral, the second 
physical.

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men 
are liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves.  
To get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the 
stoic; and the Arethusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult, 
was blazing inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath.  But the 
physical had also its part.  The cellar in which he was confined 
was some feet underground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed, 
narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of 
a green vine.  The walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare 
earth; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, a water-
jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray cloak for bedding.  To 
be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon, the 
reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and 
plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, 
struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa's blood.  Now see in how 
small a matter a hardship may consist:  the floor was exceedingly 
uneven underfoot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the 
labourers who dug the foundations of the barrack; and what with the 
poor twilight and the irregular surface, walking was impossible.  
The caged author resisted for a good while; but the chill of the 
place struck deeper and deeper; and at length, with such reluctance 
as you may fancy, he was driven to climb upon the bed and wrap 
himself in the public covering.  There, then, he lay upon the verge 
of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a garment whose 
touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far removed from 
resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received.  
These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still 
shining and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the 
tufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his more 
philosophic pace.  In those days of liberty and health he was the 
constant partner of the Arethusa, and had ample opportunity to 
share in that gentleman's disfavour with the police.  Many a bitter 
bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous comrade.  He was 
himself a man born to float easily through life, his face and 
manner artfully recommending him to all.  There was but one 
suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his 
companion.  He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is 
ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main ; nor the 
Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not 
least, he is pretty certain to remember Chatillon-sur-Loire.

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; 
and a moment later, two persons, in a high state of surprise, were 
confronted in the Commissary's office.  For if the Cigarette was 
surprised to be arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by 
the appearance and appointments of his captive.  Here was a man 
about whom there could be no mistake:  a man of an unquestionable 
and unassailable manner, in apple-pie order, dressed not with 
neatness merely but elegance, ready with his passport, at a word, 
and well supplied with money:  a man the Commissary would have 
doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and this BEAU 
CAVALIER unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade!  The 
conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours, I 
remember only one.  "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up 
from the passport.  "ALORS, MONSIEUR, VOUS ETES LE FIRS D'UN 
BARON?"  And when the Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the 
interview) denied the soft impeachment, "ALORS," from the 
Commissary, "CE N'EST PAS VOTRE PASSEPORT!"  But these were 
ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying hands upon the 
Cigarette; presently he fell into a mood of unrestrained 
admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack, commanding 
our friend's tailor.  Ah, what an honoured guest was the Commissary 
entertaining! what suitable clothes he wore for the warm weather! 
what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he carried 
in his knapsack!  You are to understand there was now but one point 
of difference between them:  what was to be done with the Arethusa? 
the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming 
him as the dungeon's own.  Now it chanced that the Cigarette had 
passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made 
acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; 
and in the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of 
Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish.  
I pass over this lightly; it is highly possible there was some 
misunderstanding, highly possible that the Commissary (charmed with 
his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took for an 
act of growing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a 
bribe.  And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more singular than 
an odd volume of Michelet's history?  The work was promised him for 
the morrow, before our departure; and presently after, either 
because he had his price, or to show that he was not the man to be 
behind in friendly offices - "EH BIEN," he said, "JE SUPPOSE QU'IL 
FAUT LAHER VOIRE CAMARADE."  And he tore up that feast of humour, 
the unfinished PROCES-VERBAL.  Ah, if he had only torn up instead 
the Arethusa's roundels!  There were many works burnt at 
Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I 
could better spare than the PROCES-VERBAL of Chatillon.  Poor 
bubuckled Commissary!  I begin to be sorry that he never had his 
Michelet:  perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based 
stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a taste for 
letters, a ready admiration for the admirable.  And if he did not 
admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that.

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there 
came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains.  He sprang to his feet, 
ready to welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the 
door was flung wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the 
strong daylight, and with a magnificent gesture (being probably a 
student of the drama) - "VOUS ETES LIBRE!" he said.  None too soon 
for the Arethusa.  I doubt if he had been half-an-hour imprisoned; 
but by the watch in a man's brain (which was the only watch he 
carried) he should have been eight times longer; and he passed 
forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the healing warmth of 
the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a 
cow's into his nostril; and he heard again (and could have laughed 
for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum 
of life.

And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, 
this was an act-drop and not the curtain.  Upon what followed in 
front of the barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple 
to expatiate.  The wife of the Marechal-des-logis was a handsome 
woman, and yet the Arethusa was not sorry to be gone from her 
society.  Something of her image, cool as a peach on that hot 
afternoon, still lingers in his memory:  yet more of her 
conversation.  "You have there a very fine parlour," said the poor 
gentleman. - "Ah," said Madame la Marechale (des-logis), "you are 
very well acquainted with such parlours!"  And you should have seen 
with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before 
her!  I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; but before that 
interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale.  His passion 
(as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood confessed 
in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame 
meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with barbed 
words and staring him coldly down.

It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still 
to sit down to an excellent dinner in the inn.  Here, too, the 
despised travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, 
a gentleman of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had 
the good taste to find pleasure in their society.  The dinner at an 
end, the gentleman proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in 
the cafe.

The cafe was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each 
other and the world the smallness of their bags.  About the centre 
of the room, the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat with their new 
acquaintance; a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after 
their late experience) were greedy of consideration, and their 
sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners.  Suddenly the 
glass door flew open with a crash; the Marechal-des-logis appeared 
in the interval, gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered without 
salutation, strode up the room with a clang of spurs and weapons, 
and disappeared through a door at the far end.  Close at his heels 
followed the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon, imitating, with 
a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearing of his chief; 
only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the 
shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic 
utterance of which he had the secret - "SUIVEZ!" said he.

The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the 
signing of the declaration of independence, Mark Antony's oration, 
all the brave scenes of history, I conceive as having been not 
unlike that evening in the cafe at Chatillon.  Terror breathed upon 
the assembly.  A moment later, when the Arethusa had followed his 
recaptors into the farther part of the house, the Cigarette found 
himself alone with his coffee in a ring of empty chairs and tables, 
all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous 
voices hushed in whispering, all their eyes shooting at him 
furtively as at a leper.

And the Arethusa?  Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, 
interview in the back kitchen.  The Marechal-des-logis, who was a 
very handsome man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had 
no clear opinion on the case.  He thought the Commissary had done 
wrong, but he did not wish to get his subordinates into trouble; 
and he proposed this, that, and the other, to all of which the 
Arethusa (with a growing sense of his position) demurred.

"In short," suggested the Arethusa, "you want to wash your hands of 
further responsibility?  Well, then, let me go to Paris."

The Marechal-des-logis looked at his watch.

"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris."

And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their 
misadventure in the dining-room at Siron's.



CHAPTER V - RANDOM MEMORIES



I. - THE COAST OF FIFE


MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day 
or the first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I 
believe, they are more often agreeably exciting.  Misery - or at 
least misery unrelieved - is confined to another period, to the 
days of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of departure; when 
the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new 
interests, not yet begun:  and to the pain of an imminent parting, 
there is added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence.  
The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-
suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the 
thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field - what 
a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each 
familiar circumstance!  The assaults of sorrow come not from 
within, as it seems to him, but from without.  I was proud and glad 
to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like 
any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a 
conspiracy of lamentation:  "Poor little boy, he is going away - 
unkind little boy, he is going to leave us"; so the unspoken 
burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach.  And at 
length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a 
place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn 
and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I 
saw - the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church 
upon the hill, the woody hillside garden - a look of such a 
piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-
step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy.  A benevolent cat 
cumbered me the while with consolations - we two were alone in all 
that was visible of the London Road:  two poor waifs who had each 
tasted sorrow - and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for 
his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly 
eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her!  I confessed at home the 
story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain 
journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the 
London Road.  It was judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the 
public highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense) 
indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of 
Scotland; and it was decided he should take me along with him 
around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first professional tour, 
my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help 
of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the 
curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths 
of Forth and Tay.  It may be continually seen from many parts of 
Edinburgh (among the rest, from the windows of my father's house) 
dying away into the distance and the easterly HAAR with one smoky 
seaside town beyond another, or in winter printing on the gray 
heaven some glittering hill-tops.  It has no beauty to recommend 
it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very 
rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of 
rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to 
the eye.  It is of the coast I speak:  the interior may be the 
garden of Eden.  History broods over that part of the world like 
the easterly HAAR.  Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-
names bear testimony to an old and settled race.  Of these little 
towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit 
of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its 
flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has 
its legend, quaint or tragic:  Dunfermline, in whose royal towers 
the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-
red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; 
Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by 
Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled"; Burntisland where, 
when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a 
table carried between tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the 
rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect; 
Kinghorn, where Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland to 
the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed 
extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea; 
Dysart, famous - well famous at least to me for the Dutch ships 
that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers 
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one 
particular Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the 
break of the poop, smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce 
Weems) with its bat-haunted caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, 
on his flight from Culloden, passed a night of superstitious 
terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer 
visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall figure and 
the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr. 
Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the 
troopers from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the 
streets of the imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful 
of heroes at the magazine, and the nameless brave one in the 
telegraph office was perhaps already fingering his last despatch; 
and just a little beyond Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo 
town mounting about its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better 
known under the name of Robinson Crusoe.  So on, the list might be 
pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader will shortly 
have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pittenweem, and 
the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where Primate 
Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister:  on to the 
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted 
elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking 
but the breach or the quiescence of the deep - the Carr Rock beacon 
rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the 
Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May 
Island on the other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on 
the craggy foreland of St. Abb's.  And but a little way round the 
corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem 
of the province and the light of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, 
where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world, 
and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in 
Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue 
Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the current 
voice of the professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a 
bleak easterly morning.  There was a crashing run of sea upon the 
shore, I recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light 
must sometimes raise their voices to be audible.  Perhaps it is 
from this circumstance, that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an 
ineffectual seat of learning, and the sound of the east wind and 
the bursting surf to linger in its drowsy classrooms and confound 
the utterance of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike 
drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats on the windows and 
the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages of the open 
lecture.  But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in 
general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who 
has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with 
his incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his best poems, 
with grace, and local truth, and a note of unaffected pathos.  Mr. 
Lang knows all about the romance, I say, and the educational 
advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the 
harbour lights; and it may be news even to him, that in the year 
1863 their case was pitiable.  Hanging about with the east wind 
humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets, 
I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting 
engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more important 
stage.  Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing:  "It is 
the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a 
correspondence of this kind with any of the keepers, and when I 
come to the Light House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet 
them with approbation and welcome their Family, it is distressing 
when one-is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and 
demeanour."  This painful obligation has been hereditary in my 
race.  I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unauthorised 
inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper on the 
question of storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach, 
when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin 
for his infant child; and then regained my equanimity with the 
thought that I had done the man a service, and when the proper 
inspector came, he would be readier with his panes.  The human race 
is perhaps credited with more duplicity than it deserves.  The 
visitation of a lighthouse at least is a business of the most 
transparent nature.  As soon as the boat grates on the shore, and 
the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the very slouch 
of the fellows' shoulders tells their story, and the engineer may 
begin at once to assume his "angry countenance."  Certainly the 
brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not 
immaculate, certainly all will be to match - the reflectors 
scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the 
storehouse.  If a light is not rather more than middling good, it 
will be radically bad.  Mediocrity (except in literature) appears 
to be unattainable by man.  But of course the unfortunate of St. 
Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no 
uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood 
(in the mediaeval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but 
he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired extremely.

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir.  My father had 
announced we were "to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful 
mind visions of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's DANCE OF 
DEATH; but it was only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, 
such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low price of one 
shilling on the streets of Edinburgh.  Beyond this disappointment, 
I remember nothing of that drive.  It is a road I have often 
travelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember any 
single trait.  The fact has not been suffered to encroach on the 
truth of the imagination.  I still see Magus Muir two hundred years 
ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's 
carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in 
pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first.  No scene 
of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not 
because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin 
of my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his 
daughter; not even because of the live bum-bee that flew out of 
Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly indicating his complicity with 
Satan; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a fine 
religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded a 
grateful relief from MINISTERING CHILDREN or the MEMOIRS OF MRS. 
KATHATINE WINSLOWE.  The figure that always fixed my attention is 
that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak 
about his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous 
hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience.  He would 
take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against 
the victim, and "that action" must be sullied with no suggestion of 
a worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action," in itself, was 
highly justified, he had cast in his lot with "the actors," and he 
must stay there, inactive but publicly sharing the responsibility.  
"You are a gentleman - you will protect me!" cried the wounded old 
man, crawling towards him.  "I will never lay a hand on you," said 
Hackston, and put his cloak about his mouth.  It is an old 
temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see the face - to 
open that bosom and to read the heart.  With incomplete romances 
about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered.  I read him 
up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on.  I even dug 
among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room 
where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly 
conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly 
thought) more gifted students.  All was vain:  that he had passed a 
riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed 
(compared with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly 
resolution and even of military common sense, and that he figured 
memorably in the scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I 
make out.  But whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him 
like a landmark on the plains of history, sitting with his cloak 
about his mouth, inscrutable.  How small a thing creates an 
immortality!  I do not think he can have been a man entirely 
commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or 
had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus 
have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would 
scarce delay me for a paragraph.  An incident, at once romantic and 
dramatic, which at once awakes the judgment and makes a picture for 
the eye, how little do we realise its perdurable power!  Perhaps no 
one does so but the author, just as none but he appreciates the 
influence of jingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with 
something of a covert smile, seeing people led by what they fancy 
to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed artifices of his 
own trade, or roused by what they take to be principles and are 
really picturesque effects.  In a pleasant book about a school-
class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote.  
A "Philosophical Society" was formed by some Academy boys - among 
them, Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew 
Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of THE ABODE OF SNOW.  
Before these learned pundits, one member laid the following 
ingenious problem:  "What would be the result of putting a pound of 
potassium in a pot of porter?"  "I should think there would be a 
number of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow; 
but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type 
of much that is most human.  For this inquirer who conceived 
himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed 
in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his own 
recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature.  
Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t - that 
was his idea, poor little boy!  So with politics and that which 
excites men in the present, so with history and that which rouses 
them in the past:  there lie at the root of what appears, most 
serious unsuspected elements.

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and 
Cellardyke, all three Royal Burghs - or two Royal Burghs and a less 
distinguished suburb, I forget which - lies continuously along the 
seaside, and boasts of either two or three separate parish 
churches, and either two or three separate harbours.  These 
ambiguities are painful; but the fact is (although it argue me 
uncultured), I am but poorly posted upon Cellardyke.  My business 
lay in the two Anstruthers.  A tricklet of a stream divides them, 
spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the time of my 
knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west.  
This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his 
fond tenancy, he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I 
remember rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and 
pictures, and snatches of verse in the vein of EXEGI MONUMENTUM; 
shells and pebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his 
medium; and I like to think of him standing back upon the bridge, 
when all was finished, drinking in the general effect and (like 
Gibbon) already lamenting his employment.

The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century.  Mr. 
Thomson, the "curat" of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly 
obnoxious to the devout:  in the first place, because he was a 
"curat"; in the second place, because he was a person of irregular 
and scandalous life; and in the third place, because he was 
generally suspected of dealings with the Enemy of Man.  These three 
disqualifications, in the popular literature of the time, go hand 
in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing quite by itself, 
and in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment.  He had been at a 
friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I 
suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in 
our cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of 
DELIRIUM TREMENS.  It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie 
came carrying a lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they 
went down the street of Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a 
bit in the child's hand, the barred lustre tossing up and down 
along the front of slumbering houses, and Mr. Thomson not 
altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his 
mind.  The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I 
conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear 
and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister's 
strange behaviour, started also; in so doing, she would jerk the 
lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows 
would be all confounded.  Then it was that to the unhinged toper 
and the twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to sweep 
down, to pass them close by as they stood upon the bridge, and to 
vanish on the farther side in the general darkness of the night.  
"Plainly the devil come for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child.  What 
Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of knowledge; but he 
fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge like a man praying.  
On the rest of the journey to the manse, history is silent; but 
when they came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern 
from the child, looked upon her with so lost a countenance that her 
little courage died within her, and she fled home screaming to her 
parents.  Not a soul would venture out; all that night, the 
minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and when the 
day dawned, and men made bold to go about the streets, they found 
the devil had come indeed for Mr. Thomson.