An Inland Voyage Section 4 - At Mauberge

Lyn Thompson (0:00)

Section 4 of An Inland Journey This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by Lyn Thompson An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson Atmo Berge 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 thrown in state from China to Peru, and the Union Jack flutters on all the winds of heaven. Under these safeguards, portly clergymen, schoolmistresses, gentlemen in grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British touristry, poor and hindered, 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 on 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 gnawed 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 Mauberge, 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 Mauberge.

Mauberge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the Grand Seif. 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 till we went back to liberate them. But 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 others' 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 grosser among them, however honest, harmless, and empty-headed he may feel himself to be at bottom, but comes home from one of their co-inacula, 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 paralyzes personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands at 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 will be one no longer.