Books: An Inland Voyage
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> An Inland Voyage
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8 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,
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