windmill"--the latter gone these many years--the canoeists went in
search of a lodging for the night, but had to trudge with their packs
to the neighbouring village of Pont sur Sambre for accommodation. They
would have fared better at Quartes to-day, as there is now a clean
little _auberge_ hard by the bridge, kept by a jovial fellow, who told
me that his son had taken up photography, with deplorable results. "He
takes my photograph, I assure you, M'sieu, and makes me look like a
corpse in the Morgue"--and the landlord would laugh and show two rows
of dusky teeth beneath his wiry moustache--"and when I say I'm not so
awful as that, he will say that now I see myself as I really am, for,
look you, the camera must tell the truth." He laughs again, and
rising, says: "But come with me here," throwing open the door of a
private room. "Now there's a portrait I had done in Brussels, and I'm
really a decent-looking chap in that. So I say to my son, whenever he
makes a new and worse picture of me: 'There's your papa to the life,
done by a real photographer.'"
[Illustration: ON THE SAMBRE AT QUARTES]
[Illustration: SCENE AT PONT-SUR-SAMBRE
"Away on the left, a gaunt tower stood in the middle of the
street."--R. L. S.]
I am sure they are a happy family at the inn at Quartes, and they
enjoy life, the score or two of barges and boats that pass their door
every day keeping them in touch with the outer world of towns. The
landlord informed me that he had several times been as far as Paris by
the rivers and canals, and that there are excursions all that
distance--nearly 200 miles by water--every summer.
IX.
Pont sur Sambre is a long thin village, a mile or so from Quartes, and
different from other villages only in the possession of a strange lone
tower that stands in the middle of the wide street. Stevenson makes
note of it, and says: "What it had been in past ages I know not;
probably a hold in time of war; but nowadays it bore an illegible
dial-plate in its upper parts, and near the bottom an iron
letter-box." As I was preparing to take a photograph of this landmark,
a buxom woman came up and begged that I might photograph her. I
protested my inability to do so with any satisfaction, having no stand
for my camera. "But you have a camera; isn't that enough? And I am so
anxious for a photograph." What would you in such a case? Especially
as she said she could wait a month or more for me to send a print from
England. So the widow Cerisier poses in the foreground of my picture
of the strange tower at Pont--a tower which, she told me, has weird
underground passages leading away into regions of mystery.
It was at a little ale-house within sight of the tower that Stevenson
and his friend passed the night, the landlady treating them as
pedlars, and they enjoying the experience. Here, too, they fell in
with a real pedlar, Monsieur Hector Gaillard of Maubeuge, who
travelled in grand style with a tilt-cart drawn by a donkey, and was
accompanied by his wife and his young son. Pedlars' fortunes seem to
have improved since those days, as I found a travelling cheap-jack at
Pont, with a very commodious wagon, which must have required two
horses to move it about, cunningly contrived to open into a veritable
bazaar, around which housewives and children clustered like bees.
Another packman was showing his wares hard by on a lorry equally
commodious, where he displayed to advantage an immense assortment of
second-hand clothes and remnants of cloth, while his wife was inducing
the thrifty women of Pont to buy.
The Sambre at Pont looks very alluring, especially when the sun shines
and projects the green shadows of the waving willows across its
sluggish waters. Barges pass under the bridge at a snail's pace, and
away among the winding avenue of poplars and willows that marks the
river's zigzag course through the rich and restful meadow-land we see
the masts of other boats moving with consummate slowness. R. L. S.
illustrates the erratic course of the river by stating that while they
could walk from Quartes to Pont in about ten minutes, the distance by
river was six kilometres, or close on four miles. The folk at the
ale-house were amazed when their guests, after walking to Quartes next
morning, arrived by river an hour or so later as the owners of two
dainty canoes. "They began to perceive that they had entertained
angels unawares. The landlady stood upon the bridge, probably
lamenting she had charged so little; the son ran to and fro, and
called out the neighbours to enjoy the sight; and we paddled away from
quite a crowd of wrapt observers. These gentlemen pedlars indeed! Now
you see their quality too late."
X.
The country between Pont and Landrecies wears many signs of quiet
prosperity; houses are numerous, orchards well-stocked, the
people--and never is the highway utterly deserted--smiling and
contented, to all appearance. The river at a point about six miles
from Landrecies skirts a part of the forest of Mormal, and our
sentimental traveller turns the occasion to profit thus:
[Illustration: THE SAMBRE CANAL AT LANDRECIES
As it was at the time of "An Inland Voyage."]
[Illustration: THE FOREST OF MORMAL FROM THE SAMBRE
"We were skirting the Forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear,
but a place most gratifying to sight and smell."--R. L. S.]
"There is nothing so much alive, and yet so quiet, as a woodland; and
a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very small and
bustling by comparison. And surely of all smells in the world, the
smell of many trees is the sweetest and most fortifying. The sea has a
rude, pistolling sort of odour, that takes you in the nostrils like
snuff, and carries with it a fine sentiment of open water and tall
ships; but the smell of a forest, which comes nearest to this in tonic
quality, surpasses it by many degrees in the quality of softness.
Again, the smell of the sea has little variety, but the smell of a
forest is infinitely changeful; it varies with the hour of the day,
not in strength merely, but in character; and the different sorts of
trees, as you go from one zone of the wood to another, seem to live
among different kinds of atmosphere. Usually the resin of the fir
predominates. But some woods are more coquettish in their habits; and
the breath of the forest of Mormal, as it came aboard upon us that
showery afternoon, was perfumed with nothing less delicate than
sweetbriar."
Further on he says: "Alas! the forest of Mormal is only a little bit
of a wood, and it was but for a little way that we skirted by its
boundaries." So it may have seemed to the canoeists, who saw only a
scrap of the great forest, that thrusts southward to the river at a
place called Hachette. But it was not without some misgiving that I
found myself suddenly plunged into the woodland, and discovered that I
had six miles of it to penetrate and roads to ride which a little boy
in a cart described eloquently by stretching his arm to its limit and
then sweeping it down to the cart, and up and down half a dozen times!
The forest has indeed, as R. L. S. observes, "a sinister name to the
ear," and I felt--if I must speak the truth--a little quickening of
the pulse when I had ridden about half an hour through its lonely
rough roads, with rabbits and other wild creatures of the undergrowth
making strange rustlings among the leaves by the wayside. The sun had
been going down as I came into the forest, but the air among the trees
was chilling and wintry after the warm high-road, not a slanting ray
of sunshine penetrating the dense growth of trees. The only
pedestrians whom I met were a party of rough sportsmen, who eyed me as
a curious bird when, in answer to their questions, I said I had come
from London. I had wandered from the direct road through the forest,
it appeared, and one of the men, having a map, was able to work out a
route for me; but it was another half-hour--which seemed like half a
day--before I caught a welcome glimpse of the clear evening sky among
the lower branches, and presently emerged on the main road into
Landrecies, at a place suggestively named Bout du Monde.
XI.
If there is another town so dead as Landrecies in all the department
of Le Nord, I have a great wish not to pass a night within its walls.
It is changed times there since the passage of R. L. S., although it
was _triste_ enough when "Arethusa" and "Cigarette" spent two days at
the roomy old Hôtel de la Tête d'Or. "Within the ramparts," he says,
"a few blocks of houses, a long row of barracks and a church, figure,
with what countenance they may, as the town. There seems to be no
trade; and a shopkeeper, from whom I bought a sixpenny flint-and-steel,
was so much affected that he filled my pockets with spare flints into
the bargain. The only public buildings that had any interest for us
were the hotel and the café. But we visited the church. There lies
Marshal Clarke; but as neither of us had heard of that military hero,
we bore the associations of the spot with fortitude."
Marshal Clarke, whose tomb looks as new as though it had been set up
yesterday, was one of Napoleon's generals, and, as his epitaph reminds
us, sometime minister of war. Had he hailed from Scotland instead of
Ireland he might have been more interesting to R. L. S.
If Landrecies was so dull thirty years ago, picture it to-day, with
its barracks almost empty, its ramparts demolished, and its less than
4,000 inhabitants in bed by nine o'clock! "It was just the place to
hear the round going by at night in the darkness, with the solid tramp
of men marching, and the startling reverberations of the drum. It
reminded you, that even this place was a point in the great warfaring
system of Europe, and might on some future day be ringed about with
cannon smoke and thunder, and make itself a name among strong towns."
Alas! the barking of a melancholy dog and the clock of the Hôtel de
Ville ringing out the lazy hours were the only sounds I heard that
night, though just before dusk a wandering camelot selling in the
street a sheet of "all the latest Paris songs" made a welcome
diversion. I sampled his stock, and found it to consist of doggerel
rhymes about the Russo-Japanese War, mingled with some amorous
ditties, and a piece of a devotional kind! "_C'est une ville morte_,"
said a dumpy lady with a scorbutic face, who drank her after-dinner
coffee in the dining-room with me. "Think of Paris, and then--this!"
she sighed. I wondered what had brought her there, and doubtless she
thought I was some cycling fellow who had lost his way.
But if the military glory of Landrecies is departed, it makes a brave
effort to recall the past with an elegant column near the site of the
north gate, whereon are recorded the sieges which Landrecies
withstood, the last being in the Franco-German War. Also erected since
Stevenson's time is a striking monument to the great Joseph François
Dupleix, whose gallant effort to found an Indian empire for France was
frustrated by Clive, and who, born in Landrecies, spent his substance
for his fatherland, only to die in poverty and neglect.
[Illustration: THE INN AT MOY
"Sweet was our rest in the 'Golden Sheep' at Moy."--R. L. S.]
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE STREET, MOY
"Moy was a pleasant little village."--R. L. S.]
The landlord of the hotel assured me that he remembered the visit of
my heroes, even mentioning the hour of their arrival and departure.
He was a young man then; but to-day his hair is streaked with grey.
The _Juge de Paix_, who entertained the travellers, is still to the
fore: a bachelor then, he is a widower now.
I noticed an odd feature of the hotel: its meat safe was the roof of
the passage to the courtyard. Here, hanging from hooks fixed in the
roof, were joints of beef, legs of mutton, hares, rabbits, and so
forth--an abundant display; and when the cook was in need of an item,
she came out with a long pole and reached down the piece she wanted.
XII.
The canoeists left Landrecies on a rainy morning, the judge under an
umbrella seeing them off. My lot was pleasanter, for the morning was
fine and the landlord's son, a bright lad, with those babyish socks
which French boys wear, escorted me some way out of the town on his
bicycle, chatting merrily about the state of the roads, and evincing
great surprise when he heard that we would be fined for cycling on the
footpath in England.
My route lay along the highway to Guise for a time and close to the
canal, passing through a gentle undulating country with far views of
thickly-wooded fields and little hills. The hamlets by the way were
surrounded by hop fields, the great poles with their fantastic
coverings of the vine being the most noticeable feature of the
wayside, just as R. L. S. had observed them when the hop-growers of
to-day were _bien jeune_, as the old gentleman at the play in Paris
described Stevenson himself. Etreux, where the canal journey ended, I
found a thriving and agreeable little town, the rattle of the loom
being heard from many an open door, and the thud, thud of flails in
the farm-steadings on the outskirts. At Etreux the canoes were placed
on a light country cart one morning, and the travellers walked to
Vadencourt by way of Tupigny, a village where I was served with a
make-shift lunch at a little inn, the landlady doing the cooking and
laying the table with a baby held in her left arm! Vadencourt is full
of weavers, and here close by the old bridge over the river the
_Arethusa_ and _Cigarette_ were launched in the fast-flowing water of
the River Oise.
XIII.
The canoeists were now in the full swing of perhaps the most enjoyable
part of their journey. Let a canal be never so beautiful, it is still
a canal, and no adventure need be looked for there; but a river that
runs wild and free is a possible highway to the enchanted kingdom of
Romance. We have the avowal of R. L. S. that on this sedgy stream,
wriggling its devious ways by field and woodland, he had some of the
happiest moments of his life.
"We could have shouted aloud," he says in a glowing passage. "If this
lively and beautiful river were, indeed, a thing of death's
contrivance, the old ashen rogue had famously outwitted himself with
us. I was living three to the minute. I was scoring points against him
every stroke of my paddle, every turn of the stream. I have rarely had
better profit of my life. For I think we may look upon our little
private war with death somewhat in this light. If a man knows he will
sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the
best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much
gained upon the thieves. And above all, where, instead of simply
spending, he makes a profitable investment for some of his money, when
it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk living, and
above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the
wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our pockets, the
more in our stomach, when he cries, 'Stand and deliver.' A swift
stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in a
comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our
accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper
Oise."
Indeed, he came near to settling accounts with old Death more readily
than he could have cared; for not many miles from Vadencourt, in
attempting to shoot below the over-hanging trunk of a fallen tree, the
lively "Arethusa" was caught in its branches, while his canoe went
spinning down stream relieved of its paddler. He succeeded in
scrambling on to the tree-trunk, though he "seemed, by the weight, to
have all the water of the Oise in my trouser-pockets." But through
all, he still held to his paddle. "On my tomb, if ever I have one, I
mean to get these words inscribed: 'He clung to his paddle.'" Brave
heart, this is in truth but a humorous phrasing of the stately requiem
on the stone upon Vaea Top.
It was a dripping "Arethusa" that got into Origny Sainte-Benoîte that
night, and but for the ready and resourceful "Cigarette" the adventure
might have ended less happily. Although Origny is a dusty little
village, as dull as any in all Picardy, the canoeists rested there a
day, and had good profit of the people they met at the inn, as
Stevenson's pages witness. The landlord was a shouting, noisy fellow,
a red Republican. "'I'm a proletarian, you see.' Indeed, we saw it
very well. God forbid that I should find him handling a gun in Paris
streets! That will not be a good moment for the general public."
[Illustration: VEUVE BAZIN
Hastily and unnecessarily "tidying herself" while being photographed
at her door.]
[Illustration: THE BAZINS' INN AT LA FÈRE
"Little did the Bazins know how much they served us."--R. L. S.]
XIV.
An accident to my bicycle in the neighbourhood of Origny made it
necessary for me to go on to Moy by train, on a quaint little railway
worked chiefly by women, who act as station-mistresses, ticket-clerks,
restaurant-keepers, and guards of the level crossings. The carriages
were filled chiefly with anglers, and every little station had a gang
of them armed with a prodigious number of rods and lines, and each
carrying a pail with a brass lid. I gathered that the pails were empty
almost without exception, as sport had been extremely bad, though
numerous patient creatures with rod and line were still to be seen in
the drizzling rain along the river, which is here broken into many
backwaters, lying in flat land among scraggy pine woods and good green
meadows. One sturdy fellow who, like his companions, bore his
ill-fortune with a smiling face, averred that though he'd fished all
day and caught nothing, he had bagged fifteen _broche_ the previous
day between one o'clock and half-past two, and between three and five
he had caught an unbelievable number of trout. Anglers are the same in
all lands, I suspect.
"Moy (pronounced Moy) was a pleasant little village, gathered round a
château in a moat," as our author records. "The air was perfumed with
hemp from neighbouring fields. At the 'Golden Sheep' we found
excellent entertainment." I asked for the "Golden Sheep," and was
directed to an establishment that was named the Hôtel de la Poste. I
passed on and asked another villager, but he sent me back, as I found
on following his instructions, to the same hotel. The postman put me
right at length by explaining that the landlord had rechristened his
house three months before in honour of the new post office across the
way, a shoddy little building where I bought stamps from a middle-aged
woman next morning. The landlady of the hotel, who might pass in every
particular, save the myopia, for the "stout, plain, short-sighted,
motherly body, with something not far short of a genius for cookery,"
described by R. L. S., agreed with me that her husband had made a sad
mistake in dropping the old sign of the "Collier d'Or," "but he would
have his own way, and there you are!" If I could have got the
fellow--a fat, jolly mortal--to understand that to have the name of
his hotel in a book by R. L. S. was an honour worth living up to,
perhaps the old sign would have been fished out, regilded and placed
in its old position. But he had not been the _patron_ thirty years
ago, and he did not care a straw for anything so remote, though his
wife had a gleam of pleasure when I quoted to her Stevenson's note:
"Sweet was our rest in the 'Golden Sheep' at Moy."
It is a progressive place, although it seems to go to bed at eight
o'clock, for there is a good supply of electric light--furnished by
water power, of course--in the hotel and other establishments; but not
a solitary street lamp to pierce the blue-black of an autumn night. I
must tell you that I was the only guest at the inn, yet a splendid
dinner was prepared for me. Soup, fish with mayonaise, fillet of beef
with mushrooms, green haricots _au beurre_, cold chicken, and a
delicious salad of white herbs with a suspicion of garlic, a sweet
omelet, pears, grapes, cheese, bread and butter, and, if I had cared,
a whole bottle of red wine. An excellent _café noir_ followed, in the
_estaminet_, where my hostess apologised for lighting only one
electric lamp "_pour l'economie, vous savez_." My bedroom was
commodious and well-appointed, and I had a good French _petit
dejeuner_ next morning. The bill? Three shillings and ninepence, I
declare! _Pour l'economie!_ Madame, I sympathise, and some day I must
return to make a visit more profitable to you.
XV.
From Moy to La Fère is a very short journey even by the river, but the
canoeists had lingered till late afternoon before leaving the former
place, which "invited to repose," and it was dark when they got to La
Fère in their chronic state of dampness. "It was a fine night to be
within doors over dinner, and hear the rain upon the windows." They
had heard that the principal inn at the place was a particularly good
one, and cheery pictures of their comfortable state there arose in
their minds as they stowed their canoes and set forth into the town,
which lies chiefly eastward of the river, and is enclosed by two great
lines of fortification. But they reckoned without their hostess! The
lady of the inn mistook them for pedlars, and rushed them back into
the dismal night. "Out with you--out of the door!" she screeched.
"_Sortez! Sortez! Sortez par la porte!_" Stevenson's picture of the
incident is full of sly humour, but the feelings of the travellers
must indeed have been poignant. "We have been taken for pedlars
again," said the baronet, "Good God, what it must be to be a pedlar in
reality!" says his companion of the pen. "Timon was a philanthropist
alongside of him." He prayed that he might never be uncivil to a
pedlar. But after all, it was for the best. That cosy inn would not
have afforded the essayist such interesting matter for reflection as
he found at "la Croix de Malte," a little working-class _auberge_ at
the other end of the town, where the Porte Notre-Dame gives exit to
the straggling suburbs.
[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL, NOYON]
[Illustration: HÔTEL DU NORD, NOYON
_Where the travellers stayed_
"The Hotel du Nord lights its secular tapers within a stone-cast of
the church."--R. L. S.]
XVI.
There is no passage in the whole of _An Inland Voyage_ so moving, so
simple in its intense humanity, as that wherein its author sets down
in his own inimitable way his impressions of the humble folk who kept
this inn. Scarcely hoping that I might be so fortunate as to find
either of the Bazins alive, I asked at one of the numerous cafés
opposite the great barracks, whence crashed forth the indescribable
noise of a brass band practising for the first time together, if there
was an inn in the town kept by one Bazin. To my delight I was told
there was, and you may be sure I made haste to be there. I found the
place precisely as Stevenson pictures it, noting by the way a tiny new
Protestant chapel with the legend "Culte Evangélique" over its door, a
cheering sight to Protestant eyes in so Catholic a country as the
north of France.