Part 6

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."

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.

At the little hamlet of Quartes, "with its church and bickering 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.'"

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:

"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.

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."

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.