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 Hôtel 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?