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 _café_ 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.