An Inland Voyage E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 186

Beschreibung

Classic travelogue/memoir. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."

Leseprobe

AN INLAND VOYAGE BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

feedback welcome: [email protected]

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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

ANTWERP TO BOOM

ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL

THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE

AT MAUBEUGE

ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED, TO QUARTES

PONT-SUR-SAMBRE, WE ARE PEDLARS

PONT-SUR-SAMBRE, THE TRAVELLING MERCHANT

ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED, TO LANDRECIES

AT LANDRECIES

SAMBRE AND OISE CANAL, CANAL BOATS

THE OISE IN FLOOD

ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOITE,  A BY-DAY

ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOITE, THE COMPANY AT TABLE

DOWN THE OISE,  TO MOY

LA FERE OF CURSED MEMORY

DOWN THE OISE,  THROUGH THE GOLDEN VALLEY

NOYON CATHEDRAL

DOWN THE OISE, TO COMPIEGNE

AT COMPIEGNE

CHANGED TIMES

DOWN THE OISE:  CHURCH INTERIORS

PRECY AND THE MARIONNETTES

BACK TO THE WORLD

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

To equip so small a book with a preface is, I am half afraid, to  sin against proportion.  But a preface is more than an author can  resist, for it is the reward of his labours.  When the foundation  stone is laid, the architect appears with his plans, and struts for  an hour before the public eye.  So with the writer in his preface:   he may have never a word to say, but he must show himself for a  moment in the portico, hat in hand, and with an urbane demeanour.

It is best, in such circumstances, to represent a delicate shade of  manner between humility and superiority:  as if the book had been  written by some one else, and you had merely run over it and  inserted what was good.  But for my part I have not yet learned the  trick to that perfection; I am not yet able to dissemble the warmth  of my sentiments towards a reader; and if I meet him on the  threshold, it is to invite him in with country cordiality.

To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in  proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension.  It  occurred to me that I might not only be the first to read these  pages, but the last as well; that I might have pioneered this very  smiling tract of country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow  in my steps.  The more I thought, the more I disliked the notion;  until the distaste grew into a sort of panic terror, and I rushed  into this Preface, which is no more than an advertisement for  readers.

What am I to say for my book?  Caleb and Joshua brought back from  Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces  naught so nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age  when people prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.

I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the  negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain  stamp.  Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred  pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of  God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made  a better one myself. - I really do not know where my head can have  been.  I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be  man. - 'Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically  unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please in  frivolous circles.

To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed  I wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards  him an almost exaggerated tenderness.  He, at least, will become my  reader: - if it were only to follow his own travels alongside of  mine.

R.L.S.

ANTWERP TO BOOM

WE made a great stir in Antwerp Docks.  A stevedore and a lot of  dock porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the  slip.  A crowd of children followed cheering.  The CIGARETTE went  off in a splash and a bubble of small breaking water.  Next moment  the ARETHUSA was after her.  A steamer was coming down, men on the  paddle-box shouted hoarse warnings, the stevedore and his porters  were bawling from the quay.  But in a stroke or two the canoes were  away out in the middle of the Scheldt, and all steamers, and  stevedores, and other 'long-shore vanities were left behind.

The sun shone brightly; the tide was making - four jolly miles an  hour; the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls.  For my  part, I had never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my  first experiment out in the middle of this big river was not made  without some trepidation.  What would happen when the wind first  caught my little canvas?  I suppose it was almost as trying a  venture into the regions of the unknown as to publish a first book,  or to marry.  But my doubts were not of long duration; and in five  minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I had tied my  sheet.

I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself; 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 commonplace, 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.  I believe this is every one's experience:  but an  apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents  mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad.  I wish  sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been  some one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger;  to tell me how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and  how the good in a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be  overlaid, and rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need.  But  we are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in literature; and  not a man among us will go to the head of the march to sound the  heady drums.

It was agreeable upon the river.  A barge or two went past laden  with hay.  Reeds and willows bordered the stream; and cattle and  grey venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the  embankment.  Here and there was a pleasant village among trees,  with a noisy shipping-yard; here and there a villa in a lawn.  The  wind served us well up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel; and  we were running pretty free when we began to sight the brickyards  of Boom, lying for a long way on the right bank of the river.  The  left bank was still green and pastoral, with alleys of trees along  the embankment, and here and there a flight of steps to serve a  ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with her elbows on her  knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver spectacles.  But  Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with every  minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge over  the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.

Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing:   that the majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that  they can speak English, which is not justified by fact.  This gave  a kind of haziness to our intercourse.  As for the Hotel de la  Navigation, I think it is the worst feature of the place.  It  boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at one end, looking on the  street; and another sanded parlour, darker and colder, with an  empty bird-cage and a tricolour subscription box by way of sole  adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three  uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman.  The  food, as usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional  character; indeed I have never been able to detect anything in the  nature of a meal among this pleasing people; they seem to peck and  trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit:  tentatively  French, truly German, and somehow falling between the two.

The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the  old piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to  hold its lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer.   The engineer apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor  indeed to the bagman; but talked low and sparingly to one another,  or raked us in the gaslight with a gleam of spectacles.  For though  handsome lads, they were all (in the Scots phrase) barnacled.

There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough  out of England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and  all sorts of curious foreign ways, which need not here be  specified.  She spoke to us very fluently in her jargon, asked us  information as to the manners of the present day in England, and  obligingly corrected us when we attempted to answer.  But as we  were dealing with a woman, perhaps our information was not so much  thrown away as it appeared.  The sex likes to pick up knowledge and  yet preserve its superiority.  It is good policy, and almost  necessary in the circumstances.  If a man finds a woman admire him,  were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at  once to build upon the admiration.  It is only by unintermittent  snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in our place.  Men, as  Miss Howe or Miss Harlowe would have said, 'are such ENCROACHERS.'   For my part, I am body and soul with the women; and after a well- married couple, there is nothing so beautiful in the world as the  myth of the divine huntress.  It is no use for a man to take to the  woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and  had a pitiful time of it by all accounts.  But there is this about  some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist among men, that  they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone  without the countenance of any trousered being.  I declare,  although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to  women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or  indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss.  There is nothing so  encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency.  And when I think  of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the  note of Diana's horn; moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as  they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched by the  commotion of man's hot and turbid life - although there are plenty  other ideals that I should prefer - I find my heart beat at the  thought of this one.  'Tis to fail in life, but to fail with what a  grace!  That is not lost which is not regretted.  And where - here  slips out the male - where would be much of the glory of inspiring  love, if there were no contempt to overcome?

ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL

NEXT morning, when we set forth on the Willebroek Canal, the rain  began heavy and chill.  The water of the canal stood at about the  drinking temperature of tea; and under this cold aspersion, the  surface was covered with steam.  The exhilaration of departure, and  the easy motion of the boats under each stroke of the paddles,  supported us through this misfortune while it lasted; and when the  cloud passed and the sun came out again, our spirits went up above  the range of stay-at-home humours.  A good breeze rustled and  shivered in the rows of trees that bordered the canal.  The leaves  flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous masses.  It seemed  sailing weather to eye and ear; but down between the banks, the  wind reached us only in faint and desultory puffs.  There was  hardly enough to steer by.  Progress was intermittent and  unsatisfactory.  A jocular person, of marine antecedents, hailed us  from the tow-path with a 'C'EST VITE, MAIS C'EST LONG.'

The canal was busy enough.  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 a flower- pot in one of the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman  busied about the day's dinner, and a handful of children.  These  barges were all tied one behind the other with tow ropes, to the  number of twenty-five or thirty; and the line was headed and kept  in motion by a steamer of strange construction.  It had neither  paddle-wheel nor screw; but by some gear not rightly comprehensible  to the unmechanical mind, it fetched up over its bow a small bright  chain which lay along the bottom of the canal, and paying it out  again over the stern, dragged itself forward, link by link, with  its whole retinue of loaded skows.  Until one had found out the key  to the enigma, there was something solemn and uncomfortable in the  progress of one of these trains, as it moved gently along the water  with nothing to mark its advance but an eddy alongside dying away  into the wake.

Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, 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.  It is a mystery how things ever get to  their destination at this rate; and to see the barges waiting their  turn at a lock, affords a fine lesson of how easily the world may  be taken.  There should be many contented spirits on board, for  such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.

The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the  canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge  floats by great forests and through great cities with their public  buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his  floating home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were  listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a  picture-book in which he had no concern.  He may take his afternoon  walk in some foreign country on the banks of the canal, and then  come home to dinner at his own fireside.

There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of  health; but a high measure of health is only necessary for  unhealthy people.  The slug of a fellow, who is never ill nor well,  has a quiet time of it in life, and dies all the easier.

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.  The bargee is on shipboard - he is  master in his own ship - he can land whenever he will - he can  never be kept beating off a lee-shore a whole frosty night when the  sheets are as hard as iron; and so far as I can make out, time  stands as nearly still with him as is compatible with the return of  bed-time or the dinner-hour.  It is not easy to see why a bargee  should ever die.

Half-way between Willebroek and Villevorde, in a beautiful reach of  canal like a squire's avenue, we went ashore to lunch.  There were  two eggs, a junk of bread, and a bottle of wine on board the  ARETHUSA; and two eggs and an Etna cooking apparatus on board the  CIGARETTE.  The master of the latter boat smashed one of the eggs  in the course of disembarkation; but observing pleasantly that it  might still be cooked A LA PAPIER, he dropped it into the Etna, in  its covering of Flemish newspaper.  We landed in a blink of fine  weather; but we had not been two minutes ashore before the wind  freshened into half a gale, and the rain began to patter on our  shoulders.  We sat as close about the Etna as we could.  The  spirits burned with great ostentation; the grass caught flame every  minute or two, and had to be trodden out; and before long, there  were several burnt fingers of the party.  But the solid quantity of  cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display;  and when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound  egg was little more than loo-warm; and as for A LA PAPIER, it was a  cold and sordid FRICASSEE of printer's ink and broken egg-shell.   We made shift to roast the other two, by putting them close to the  burning spirits; and that with better success.  And then we  uncorked the bottle of wine, and sat down in a ditch with our canoe  aprons over our knees.  It rained smartly.  Discomfort, when it is  honestly uncomfortable and makes no nauseous pretensions to the  contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and people well steeped  and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for laughter.   From this point of view, even egg A LA PAPIER offered by way of  food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun.  But this  manner of jest, although it may be taken in good part, does not  invite repetition; and from that time forward, the Etna voyaged  like a gentleman in the locker of the CIGARETTE.

It is almost unnecessary to mention that when lunch was over and we  got aboard again and made sail, the wind promptly died away.  The  rest of the journey to Villevorde, we still spread our canvas to  the unfavouring air; and with now and then a puff, and now and then  a spell of paddling, drifted along from lock to lock, between the  orderly trees.

It was a fine, green, fat landscape; or rather a mere green water- lane, going on from village to village.  Things had a settled look,  as in places long lived in.  Crop-headed children spat upon us from  the bridges as we went below, with a true conservative feeling.   But even more conservative were the fishermen, intent upon their  floats, who let us go by without one glance.  They perched upon  sterlings and buttresses and along the slope of the embankment,  gently occupied.  They were indifferent, like pieces of dead  nature.  They did not move any more than if they had been fishing  in an old Dutch print.  The leaves fluttered, the water lapped, but  they continued in one stay like so many churches established by  law.  You might have trepanned every one of their innocent heads,  and found no more than so much coiled fishing-line below their  skulls.  I do not care for your stalwart fellows in india-rubber  stockings breasting up mountain torrents with a salmon rod; but I  do dearly love the class of man who plies his unfruitful art, for  ever and a day, by still and depopulated waters.

At the last lock, just beyond Villevorde, there was a lock-mistress  who spoke French comprehensibly, and told us we were still a couple  of leagues from Brussels.  At the same place, the rain began again.   It fell in straight, parallel lines; and the surface of the canal  was thrown up into an infinity of little crystal fountains.  There  were no beds to be had in the neighbourhood.  Nothing for it but to  lay the sails aside and address ourselves to steady paddling in the  rain.

Beautiful country houses, with clocks and long lines of shuttered  windows, and fine old trees standing in groves and avenues, gave a  rich and sombre aspect in the rain and the deepening dusk to the  shores of the canal.  I seem to have seen something of the same  effect in engravings:  opulent landscapes, deserted and overhung  with the passage of storm.  And throughout we had the escort of a  hooded cart, which trotted shabbily along the tow-path, and kept at  an almost uniform distance in our wake.

THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE