finding a ready purchaser at much below prime cost. "For twelve days
we had been fast companions," he writes on his last page: "we had
travelled upwards of a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several
respectable ridges, and jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky
and many a boggy by-road. After the first day, although sometimes I
was hurt and distant in manner, I still kept my patience; and as for
her, poor soul! she had come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat
out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an
ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race
and sex; her virtues were her own. Farewell! and if for ever----
Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my
turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with the
stage driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate
to yield to my emotion."
We are to imagine R. L. S. thus tearfully occupied in the stage-coach
bearing him east to Alais, an important industrial town on the main
line northward through Le Puy, whither there is no call to follow him.
We have the romantic regions of the Causses and the Tarn gorges still
to explore. Our way, no longer a pilgrim's path, lies westward.
Along the Route of "An Inland Voyage"
"Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone
upon alone. If you go in company, or even in pairs, it is
no longer a walking tour in anything but name. It is
something else, and more in the nature of a picnic. A
walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is
of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go
on, and follow this way or that as the freak takes you, and
because you must have your own pace, and neither tramp
alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.
And then you must be open to all impressions, and let
yourself take colour from what you see. You should be as a
pipe for any wind to play upon."
I.
Thus wrote Stevenson in one of his essays, but I doubt if he ever put
into practice this engaging theory of his. He came nearest to being
alone when he undertook his famous tour through the Cevennes; yet a
donkey, and one of so much character as his Modestine, is company of a
sort. When he made the first of his little journeys with a literary
end in view, he had a companion after his own heart in the late Sir
Walter Simpson, to whom the first of his books, _An Inland Voyage_, is
dedicated. That was, however, an enterprise of some adventure, and it
was well that the author had a companion, for had he fared forth alone
in his frail canoe, as did his great exemplar John MacGregor, in the
_Rob Roy_, it is doubtful if _An Inland Voyage_--not to say all that
came after it--had ever been written. In a letter sent from Compiègne
during the voyage, he gives a very cheerless picture of the business:
"We have had deplorable weather, quite steady ever since the start;
not one day without heavy showers, and generally much wind and cold
wind forby.... Indeed, I do not know if I would have stuck to it as I
have done if it had not been for professional purposes." I suspect
that no less potent an influence than "professional purposes" in
raising his courage to the height of the occasion, was the
companionship of "My dear Cigarette," as he addresses Sir Walter,
whose canoe had been named _Cigarette_, that of Stevenson sporting the
classic title _Arethusa_. Fortunately for the reading world, the
voyage, despite its discomforts, had happy issue in one of the most
charming books that came from the pen of the essayist, and although
hints are not lacking of the shadows through which the canoeists
passed, the sunshine of a gay and bright spirit is radiant on every
page.
[Illustration: BOOM ON THE RUPEL
"Boom is not a nice place."--R. L. S.]
[Illustration: VILLEVORDE ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL
"The rest of the journey to Villevorde, we still spread our canvas to
the unfavouring air."--R. L. S.]
As it had been my pleasant fortune in the summer of 1903, together
with a friend, to follow the footsteps of Stevenson in his travels
among the Cevennes, and the pilgrimage having proved plentiful of
literary interest, it seemed to me that one might find in a journey by
road along the route of "An Inland Voyage" as much of interest, and
certainly some measure of personal pleasure. Moreover, with the
disciple's daring, often greater than the master's, I desired to test
the plan of going alone. But it was more by happy chance than any
planning of mine that I betook myself, with my bicycle, to Antwerp at
precisely the same season that, eight-and-twenty years before,
Stevenson and his companion set out upon their canoe voyage by river
and canal, from that ancient port to the town of Pontoise, near the
junction of the Seine and Oise, and within hail of Paris.
In the preface to the first edition of _An Inland Voyage_, its author
expresses the fear that he "might not only be the first to read these
pages, but the last as well," and that he "might have pioneered this
very smiling tract of country all in vain, and found not a soul to
follow in my steps." That others have been before me in my late
pilgrimage is more than probable, although I have found no trace of
them; but perhaps I have not searched with care, for I would fain
flatter myself that here, as in the Cevennes, I found a field of
interest where there had been no passing of many feet.
II.
Antwerp seems a town so antique that no change of modern handiwork can
alter in any vital way its grey old features. Yet in my own
acquaintance with it, on its outward quarters at least, it has taken
on surprisingly the veneer of modern Brussels, though by the
river-side it remains much as it was when, in the later days of
August, 1876, the _Cigarette_ and the _Arethusa_, with their
adventurous occupants, were launched into the Scheldt to the no small
excitement of the loungers about the docks. There must have been some
excitement, too, in the breasts of the voyagers, but, like the true
Scots they were, we can well believe they gave no show of it.
Stevenson had never been in a canoe under sail before, and to tie his
sheet in so frail a craft in the middle of a wide and busy river
called for no contemptible degree of courage. But he tied his sheet.
"I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself," he writes.
"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 common-place 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."
There is but little of interest up the river, which waters a level,
unpicturesque country to Rupelmonde, where the canoeists would bid
good-bye to the Scheldt and steer to the south-east up the Rupel, a
broad and smooth-flowing stream that joins the greater water at this
point. Against the current they would urge their tiny prows until they
arrived after a journey of a few miles at the town of Boom, whence the
canal extends to Brussels in an almost straight line:
As I made my way that grey autumn morning through the little villages
and along the tree-lined highway, the brown leaves flickering down in
the cold wind that stirred among the branches, it pleased me to fancy
how Stevenson, had his youth fallen in the days of the bicycle, would
have enjoyed the privilege of riding on the Belgian footpath, which to
us who live in a land where no cyclist dare mount his machine except
on the highway affords a delightful sensation of lawlessness. It is
well to observe, however, that but for this right of the footpath
there would be no cyclist in all Flanders or Northern France, since
highways and by-ways there are made of the most indiscriminate
cobbles, and in the remote country places a cart on the lonely road
moves with as great a clatter as one on the stony streets of
Edinburgh.
III.
I was no great way from Boom when I saw advancing a high and narrow
structure, drawn by a horse, that progressed to the weird and
irregular clangor of a heavy bell, reminding me curiously of
Stevenson's moving description of the leper bell in _The Black Arrow_.
When I came up with the horse and its burden, I found the latter to
consist of a large circular tank, set on four wheels, with a tall box
in front for the driver, above whose head a large bell was
suspended. The word "Petrol," painted on the tank, indicated its
contents. Here, surely, was something that made the days of the canoe
voyage seem remote indeed; the peddling vendor of petrol belongs
emphatically to the new century.
[Illustration: THE ALLEE VERTE AT LAEKEN
The head-quarters of the "Royal Sport Nautique" is hidden among the
trees on the left of the picture.]
[Illustration: THE SAMBRE AT MAUBEUGE
It was at this point, "on the Sambre canalised," that the canoe voyage
began in earnest.]
"Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing: that
the majority of the habitants have a private opinion that they can
speak English, which is not justified by fact." I can heartily endorse
our canoeist's opinion of the town, but this linguistic pride of its
inhabitants is surely a vanity of the past. I found none--and I spoke
to several--who had any delusions as to their knowledge of English,
and, indeed, few of them had more than a smattering of French. A
pleasant fellow on a cycle, who had insisted on riding close to me
through the outlying districts of the town, which are entirely taken
up by extensive brickworks, where I noticed the labourers all went
bare-footed, I found capable of understanding a few words of broad
Scots, and when I said, "Boom, is't richt on?" or "Watter, richt on?"
he nodded brightly, and replied in Flemish, which was comically like
the Scots.
The Hôtel de la Navigation, where the paddlers put up for the night,
and of which Stevenson gives so bad an account, I found no trace of,
nor did I tarry any length of time in Boom, since its attractions
were so meagre. The "great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge
over the river," remain the outstanding features of the town, and
viewed from the south side of the river, it makes by no means an
unpleasing picture.
IV.
The canal was simply packed with barges and great ungainly scows in
the vicinity of the town, awaiting their turn to slip through the
locks into the freer water of the Rupel, and heigh! for Antwerp, or
even the coastwise towns of Holland. It was good to feel as one
proceeded along the tow-path that here, in this world of change, was a
stream of life flowing onward through the generations serene and
changeless. "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 flowerpot in one of the
windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman busied about the day's
dinner, and a handful of children." Every day since R. L. S. paddled
in this same stretch of water the canal has presented the same picture
of life, and thirty years hence, it is safe to prophesy, the wayfarer
will find no change, as these canals remain the great highways of
Belgium and France for the transport of goods that are in no haste;
and when we come to think of it, a great proportion of the commodities
of life may be carried from place to place in no gasping hurry for
prompt delivery.
Stevenson has many profitable reflections on the life of the
canal-folk, with which in the course of his journey he was to become
so familiar. "Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise," he
writes, "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.... There should be many
contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to
stay at home.... 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." But our philosopher, when he goes on to
enhance his comfortable picture of a bargee's life, is scarcely
correct in saying that "he can never be kept beating off a lee shore
a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron." For these
great clumsy craft know well the scent of the brine, and there are
times when the snug outlook on the towing-path, and the slow business
of passing through innumerable locks are changed for floundering in
heavy seas and a straining look-out for a safe harbour. Not all their
days are smooth and placid, and sometimes, we may imagine, the dainty
pots of geraniums, that look so gay against the windows as we pass,
must be removed to safer places, while the family washing, drying on
deck to-day, has to be stowed elsewhere, and the tow-haired children,
now playing around the dog-kennel on the top of the hatches, have to
be sent below when salt waves break over the squat prow of the vessel.
The journey along the canal bank was to me a very pleasant one, and I
had hopes of being more fortunate than the canoeists in reaching
Brussels with a dry skin. They had to paddle in an almost continual
drizzle, and even made shift to lunch in a ditch, with the rain
pattering on their waterproofs. But when I got as far as Villevorde,
where gangs of men were labouring on the extensive works in connection
with the railway and the new water supply, the rain began, and I was
wet to the skin long before I had reached the royal suburb of
Laeken, where, for evidence of Belgium's industrial progress, witness
the splendid improvement on the canal at this point, soon to become a
system of docks and water-ways resembling in extent a great railway
junction.
[Illustration: THE GRAND CERF MAUBEUGE
Where R. L. S. and his companion stayed for some days awaiting the
arrival of the canoes by rail from Brussels.]
V.
One of the most amusing episodes in "An Inland Voyage" was the
encounter of the canoeists with the young boatmen of the "Royal Sport
Nautique," who in their enthusiasm for rowing gave a warm welcome to
the strangers, and by assuming the latter to be mighty men of the
paddle, led them into the most unwarranted boasting about the sport.
"We are all employed in commerce during the day," said the Belgians,
"but in the evening, _voyez-vous, nous sommes sérieux_." An admirable
opening for a characteristic bit of Stevensonian philosophy: "For will
anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling
among boats?"
Whether or not the newer generation of Brussels boatmen are as serious
as the youths of thirty years ago I cannot say. The next afternoon,
being Sunday, I came out again from Brussels to make enquiries
concerning the "Royal Sport Nautique," and found a commodious brick
building occupying the site of the boathouse wherein Stevenson had
been entertained, but no signs of nautical life about it. There was
the slip where the _Cigarette_ and the _Arethusa_ were drawn up out of
the canal, and on the roadway opposite stood this new boathouse and
clubroom, with the dates 1865--94 indicating, as the only member whom
I found on the premises explained, that the club had been founded in
the former year, and the building erected in the latter. But he was a
churlish fellow, this coxcomb in his Sunday dress, and barely answered
my questions. If I too, had paddled my own canoe, perhaps it might
have been otherwise! The day was fine, and the canal was busy with
little excursion steamers that were well patronised by holiday-makers,
and were covered almost to the water-line with flaring advertisements
of Scotch whiskies and English soaps, only one out of a dozen
advertisements being of local origin: a circumstance that would, we
may be sure, have drawn from Stevenson some pages of gay philosophy.
VI.
Following the example of the original travellers, I took train from
Brussels to the French frontier town of Maubeuge, where in real
earnest their canoe voyage began. To the traveller who has wandered
the highways of France south and west of Paris, such a town as this
presents some uncommon features, and I cannot but think that R. L. S.
gives a wrong impression of it. "There was nothing to do, nothing to
see," he tells us, and his only joy seems to have been that he got
excellent meals at the "Grand Cerf," where he encountered the
dissatisfied driver of the hotel omnibus, who said to him: "Here I am.
I drive to the station. Well! Then I drive back again to the hotel.
And so on every day and all the week round. My God! is that life?" And
you remember Stevenson's comment: "Better a thousand times that he
should be a tramp, and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and sleep
under the trees, and see the dawn and the sunset every day above a new
horizon." Here spoke the lover of romance; but the facts are quite
otherwise.
Maubeuge I found a bright little town, surrounded by mighty ramparts
with spacious gates and bridges over the fosse. It is picturesquely
situated on the river Sambre, on whose banks stand large warehouses
and manufactories, while the shops bear evidence of prosperity. Even
_l'art nouveau_ has reached out from Paris and affected the business
architecture of the town. There is a bustling market-place, a handsome
little square with a spirited monument to the sons of the
country-side who have fallen for France, a grey old church, and a
pleasure-ground with a band-stand and elaborate arrangements for
illumination on gala nights. Indeed, I can imagine life to be very
tolerable in Maubeuge, which is really the residential centre of an
immense industrial district resembling more closely than any other
part of France our own Black Country.
Stevenson makes no mention of having visited the church, which is
interesting in one respect at least. Beneath the stucco casts of the
stations of the cross some _curé_ of an evangelical turn of mind has
ventured on a series of little homilies unusual in my experience of
French churches. Thus, under the representation of Christ falling
while bearing His cross we read: "Who is it that causes Jesus to fall
a second time? You, unhappy person, who are for ever falling in your
faults, because you lack resolution. Ask, therefore, of God that you
may henceforth become more faithful unto Him."
[Illustration: THE CHURCH AT QUARTES
"A miry lane led us up from Quartes with its church and bickering
windmill."--R. L. S.]
[Illustration: THE SAMBRE FROM THE BRIDGE AT PONT
Where "the landlady stood upon the bridge, probably lamenting she had
charged so little," when the canoeists arrived back by river from
Quartes after having been treated like pedlars at Pont.]
Only in the most insignificant way can Maubeuge have changed since Sir
Walter Simpson was nearly arrested for drawing the fortifications, "a
feat of which he was hopelessly incapable," so that I suspect
something of misplaced sentiment in Stevenson's impressions of the
place. For my part, I should find it difficult to mention a town of
the same size in England or Scotland to compare with Maubeuge as a
place to pass one's days in. That omnibus driver with the soul of a
Raleigh may have been in some measure a creature of the romancer's
fancy. At all events, it is likely enough that he has travelled far
since 1876, as I take him to have been a man of middle age then. The
hotel omnibus with its two horses still makes its journey to and from
the station, but the driver is a stout young fellow of florid face,
who, I am sure, is perfectly contented with his lot, and enjoys his
meals. "_C'est toujours la même ici_," said Veuve Bonnaire, the
landlady of the "Grand Cerf," when I chatted with her in the bureau
after luncheon. Yet not always the same, for where was M. Bonnaire?
And I fear that our canoeists, if they could visit the hostelry again
would scarce recognise in this lady of gross body their hostess of
thirty years ago. The building itself is quite unchanged, I was
assured, and I ate my food in the same room and in just such company
as the voyagers dined--military officers all absurdly alike in sharp
features, small moustache and tuft on chin, and ungallant baldness of
head; and three or four commercial travellers, each with a tendency to
"a full habit of body."
VII.
The whole establishment of the "Grand Cerf" accompanied the canoeists
to the water's edge when they were ready to take their leave. Madame
Bonnaire, however, has quite forgotten that exciting episode of her
middle life; but there, we have Stevenson's word for it, and the good
woman must accept the fame. The day was a dismal one, we are
told--wind and rain, and "a stretch of blighted country" to pass
through. I heartily wished for a speedy end to that same stretch. For
six or seven miles the road is lined with factories and dirty
cottages, while dirty electric cars rattle along, well-laden with
passengers, for here France is at work and grimy; here is the France
of which the tourist along the beaten tracks has no notion. A stout
gentleman with whom I conversed by the wayside was very proud of the
varied industries of the district. "Look you; we have glass works,
pottery works, iron foundries, engine works, copper, and many other
industries in the neighbourhood." Still, I was glad when, a mile or
two beyond Hautmont, I found myself outside this region of smoke and
growling factories and advancing into a pleasant pastoral country, the
river only a little way from the road. Stevenson's word picture of
the scene is photographic in its accuracy, but his art environs it
with that ethereal touch the old engravers could give to a landscape,
an art that has been lost to us by the vogue of cheap modern
"processes."
"After Hautmont," he writes, "the sun came forth again and the wind
went down; and a little paddling took us beyond the ironworks and
through a delectable land. The river wound among low hills, so that
sometimes the sun was at our backs, and sometimes it stood right
ahead, and the river before us was one sheet of intolerable glory. On
either hand, meadows and orchards bordered, with a margin of sedge and
water-flowers, upon the river. The hedges were of a great height,
woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms; and the fields, as they were
often small, looked like a series of bowers along the stream. There
was never any prospect; sometimes a hill-top with its trees would look
over the nearest hedgerow, just to make a middle distance for the sky;
but that was all. The heaven was bare of clouds.... The river doubled
among the hillocks, a shining strip of mirror glass; and the dip of
the paddles set the flowers shaking along the brink."
In this land of many waters every male creature seems to be a disciple
of Sir Isaak Walton. A prodigious number of anglers will be
encountered; I must have seen hundreds. Every day and all day they are
dotted along the canals and rivers as patient as posts, and apparently
as profitably employed. It was a continual wonder to me how they could
spare the time; and a pleasure also, for it is cheering to know that
so many fellow-creatures can afford to take life so leisurely, and
that the factory may whistle and the surburban train shriek laden to
the town without causing them to turn a hair. "They seem stupefied
with contentment," says R. L. S. in a fine passage, "and when we
induced them to exchange a few words with us about the weather, their
voices sounded quiet and far away."
VIII.