AT MAUBEUGE



Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal
Nauticals, partly from the fact that there were no fewer than
fifty-five locks between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded that
we should travel by train across the frontier, boats and all.
Fifty-five locks in a day's journey was pretty well tantamount to
trudging the whole distance on foot, with the canoes upon our
shoulders, an object of astonishment to the trees on the canal
side, and of honest derision to all right-thinking children.

To pass the frontier, even in a train, is a difficult matter for
the Arethusa. He is somehow or other a marked man for the official
eye. Wherever he journeys, there are the officers gathered
together. Treaties are solemnly signed, foreign ministers,
ambassadors, and consuls sit throned in state from China to Peru,
and the Union Jack flutters on all the winds of heaven. Under
these safeguards, portly clergymen, school-mistresses, gentlemen in
grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British touristry
pour unhindered, Murray in hand, over the railways of the
Continent, and yet the slim person of the Arethusa is taken in the
meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing. If he
travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about
the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he
is suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been
humiliated by a general incredulity. He is a born British subject,
yet he has never succeeded in persuading a single official of his
nationality. He flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he
is rarely taken for anything better than a spy, and there is no
absurd and disreputable means of livelihood but has been attributed
to him in some heat of official or popular distrust. . . .

For the life of me I cannot understand it. I too have been knolled
to church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it.
I am as strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I
might come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from where
I do. My ancestors have laboured in vain, and the glorious
Constitution cannot protect me in my walks abroad. It is a great
thing, believe me, to present a good normal type of the nation you
belong to.

Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I
was; and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last
between accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the
train. I was sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.

Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the Grand Cerf.
It seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at
least, these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We
had to stay there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to
follow us, and at last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until
we went back to liberate them. There was nothing to do, nothing to
see. We had good meals, which was a great matter; but that was
all.

The Cigarette was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelessly incapable. And
besides, as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the
other's fortified places already, these precautions are of the
nature of shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I
have no doubt they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a
great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or
other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the
Freemasons, who have been shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of
pride; and not a grocer among them, however honest, harmless, and
empty-headed he may feel himself to be at bottom, but comes home
from one of their coenacula with a portentous significance for
himself.

It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can
live in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the
spectacle of a whole life in which you have no part paralyses
personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. The
baker stands in his door; the colonel with his three medals goes by
to the cafe at night; the troops drum and trumpet and man the
ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It would task language to say
how placidly you behold all this. In a place where you have taken
some root, you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a
hand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But in
a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so
large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far
apart from the business, that you positively forget it would be
possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around
you, that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a
very short time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into
a wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on every
side; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up their
abode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much of
humanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the stale
externals of man's life. These externals are as dead to us as so
many formalities, and speak a dead language in our eyes and ears.
They have no more meaning than an oath or a salutation. We are so
much accustomed to see married couples going to church of a Sunday
that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and novelists are
driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish to show us
what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live for each
other.

One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his
outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough
looking little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark of
something human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey,
and came to me at once in envious sympathy. How he longed to
travel! he told me. How he longed to be somewhere else, and see
the round world before he went into the grave! 'Here I am,' said
he. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again
to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My God,
is that life?' I could not say I thought it was--for him. He
pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go;
and as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed. Might not this
have been a brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after
Drake? But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men.
He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has
the wealth and glory.

I wonder if my friend is still driving the omnibus for the Grand
Cerf? Not very likely, I believe; for I think he was on the eve of
mutiny when we passed through, and perhaps our passage determined
him for good. Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp,
and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and sleep under trees, and
see the dawn and the sunset every day above a new horizon. I think
I hear you say that it is a respectable position to drive an
omnibus? Very well. What right has he who likes it not, to keep
those who would like it dearly out of this respectable position?
Suppose a dish were not to my taste, and you told me that it was a
favourite amongst the rest of the company, what should I conclude
from that? Not to finish the dish against my stomach, I suppose.

Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not
rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment
venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will
go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind,
uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it
were as respectable as the Church of England, the sooner a man is
out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.