THERE is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey;
and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long
as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people’s doors,
and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields.
But now that it had grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at a
distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway
and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now
lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated
into civilised life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely
inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it comes
to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have trodden
on a man’s toes. In these waters we were no longer strange birds, and
nobody supposed we had travelled farther than from the last town. I
remember, when we came into L’Isle Adam, for instance, how we met dozens
of pleasure-boats outing it for the afternoon, and there was nothing to
distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except, perhaps, the
filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat actually thought
they recognised me for a neighbour. Was there ever anything more
wounding? All the romance had come down to that. Now, on the upper
Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair of
canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange and
picturesque intruders; and out of people’s wonder sprang a sort of light
and passing intimacy all along our route. There is nothing but
tit-for-tat in this world, though sometimes it be a little difficult to
trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never
yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty
much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd
wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a caravan,
we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank into
commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted. And
here is one reason of a dozen, why the world is dull to dull persons.
In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and that
quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying effect, and
shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the river no longer ran in
a proper sense, only glided seaward with an even, outright, but
imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled upon us day after day
without variety, we began to slip into that golden doze of the mind which
follows upon much exercise in the open air. I have stupefied myself in
this way more than once; indeed, I dearly love the feeling; but I never
had it to the same degree as when paddling down the Oise. It was the
apotheosis of stupidity.
We ceased reading entirely. Sometimes when I found a new paper, I took a
particular pleasure in reading a single number of the current novel; but
I never could bear more than three instalments; and even the second was a
disappointment. As soon as the tale became in any way perspicuous, it
lost all merit in my eyes; only a single scene, or, as is the way with
these _feuilletons_, half a scene, without antecedent or consequence,
like a piece of a dream, had the knack of fixing my interest. The less I
saw of the novel, the better I liked it: a pregnant reflection. But for
the most part, as I said, we neither of us read anything in the world,
and employed the very little while we were awake between bed and dinner
in poring upon maps. I have always been fond of maps, and can voyage in
an atlas with the greatest enjoyment. The names of places are singularly
inviting; the contour of coasts and rivers is enthralling to the eye; and
to hit, in a map, upon some place you have heard of before, makes history
a new possession. But we thumbed our charts, on these evenings, with the
blankest unconcern. We cared not a fraction for this place or that. We
stared at the sheet as children listen to their rattle; and read the
names of towns or villages to forget them again at once. We had no
romance in the matter; there was nobody so fancy-free. If you had taken
the maps away while we were studying them most intently, it is a fair bet
whether we might not have continued to study the table with the same
delight.
About one thing we were mightily taken up, and that was eating. I think
I made a god of my belly. I remember dwelling in imagination upon this
or that dish till my mouth watered; and long before we got in for the
night my appetite was a clamant, instant annoyance. Sometimes we paddled
alongside for a while and whetted each other with gastronomical fancies
as we went. Cake and sherry, a homely rejection, but not within reach
upon the Oise, trotted through my head for many a mile; and once, as we
were approaching Verberie, the _Cigarette_ brought my heart into my mouth
by the suggestion of oyster-patties and Sauterne.
I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner-hour thankfully
enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read something,
if it were only _Bradshaw’s Guide_. But there is a romance about the
matter after all. Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I
am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than scenery. Do
you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less
immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we are.
To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection
than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.
Canoeing was easy work. To dip the paddle at the proper inclination, now
right, now left; to keep the head down stream; to empty the little pool
that gathered in the lap of the apron; to screw up the eyes against the
glittering sparkles of sun upon the water; or now and again to pass below
the whistling tow-rope of the _Deo Gratias_ of Condé, or the _Four Sons
of Aymon_—there was not much art in that; certain silly muscles managed
it between sleep and waking; and meanwhile the brain had a whole holiday,
and went to sleep. We took in, at a glance, the larger features of the
scene; and beheld, with half an eye, bloused fishers and dabbling
washerwomen on the bank. Now and again we might be half-wakened by some
church spire, by a leaping fish, or by a trail of river grass that clung
about the paddle and had to be plucked off and thrown away. But these
luminous intervals were only partially luminous. A little more of us was
called into action, but never the whole. The central bureau of nerves,
what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without
disturbance, like a Government Office. The great wheels of intelligence
turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I have gone
on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the
hundreds. I flatter myself the beasts that perish could not underbid
that, as a low form of consciousness. And what a pleasure it was! What
a hearty, tolerant temper did it bring about! There is nothing captious
about a man who has attained to this, the one possible apotheosis in
life, the Apotheosis of Stupidity; and he begins to feel dignified and
longævous like a tree.
There was one odd piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what I
may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my
abstraction. What philosophers call _me_ and _not-me_, _ego_ and _non
ego_, preoccupied me whether I would or no. There was less _me_ and more
_not-me_ than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon somebody
else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else’s feet
against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate
relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks. Nor
this alone: something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of
my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or
perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling. I had dwindled into
quite a little thing in a corner of myself. I was isolated in my own
skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my
thoughts, they were plainly some one else’s; and I considered them like a
part of the landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near
Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I
make the Buddhists my sincere compliments; ’tis an agreeable state, not
very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a money
point of view, but very calm, golden, and incurious, and one that sets a
man superior to alarms. It may be best figured by supposing yourself to
get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it. I have a notion that
open-air labourers must spend a large portion of their days in this
ecstatic stupor, which explains their high composure and endurance. A
pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a better paradise for
nothing!
This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in
all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies
so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the
reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my condition;
when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church
spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my notice, like
solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the rhythmical swish of
boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to lull my thoughts
asleep; when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes an intolerable
eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the object of
pleased consideration;—and all the time, with the river running and the
shores changing upon either hand, I kept counting my strokes and
forgetting the hundreds, the happiest animal in France.