内河航程 英文版 An Inland Voyage
罗伯特.路易斯.史蒂文森 Robert Louis Stevenson
AT MAUBEUGE
Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the RoyalNauticals, partly from the fact that there were no fewer thanfifty-five locks between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded thatwe should travel by train across the frontier, boats and all.Fifty-five locks in a day's journey was pretty well tantamount totrudging the whole distance on foot, with the canoes upon ourshoulders, an object of astonishment to the trees on the canalside, and of honest derision to all right-thinking children.
To pass the frontier, even in a train, is a difficult matter forthe Arethusa. He is somehow or other a marked man for the officialeye. Wherever he journeys, there are the officers gatheredtogether. 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. Underthese safeguards, portly clergymen, school-mistresses, gentlemen ingrey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British touristrypour unhindered, Murray in hand, over the railways of theContinent, and yet the slim person of the Arethusa is taken in themeshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing. If hetravels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure aboutthe matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, heis suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has beenhumiliated by a general incredulity. He is a born British subject,yet he has never succeeded in persuading a single official of hisnationality. He flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet heis rarely taken for anything better than a spy, and there is noabsurd and disreputable means of livelihood but has been attributedto him in some heat of official or popular distrust. . . .
For the life of me I cannot understand it. I too have been knolledto 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. Imight come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from whereI do. My ancestors have laboured in vain, and the gloriousConstitution cannot protect me in my walks abroad. It is a greatthing, believe me, to present a good normal type of the nation youbelong to.
Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but Iwas; and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at lastbetween accepting the humiliation and being left behind by thetrain. I was sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.
wasall. Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp,and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and.
Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the Grand Cerf.It seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; atleast, these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. Wehad to stay there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry tofollow us, and at last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house untilwe went back to liberate them. There was nothing to do, nothing tosee. We had good meals, which was a great matter; but that wasall.
It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, canlive in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think thespectacle of a whole life in which you have no part paralysespersonal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. Thebaker stands in his door; the colonel with his three medals goes byto the cafe at night; the troops drum and trumpet and man theramparts, as bold as so many lions. It would task language to sayhow placidly you behold all this. In a place where you have takensome root, you are provoked out of your indifference; you have ahand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But ina strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor solarge as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so farapart from the business, that you positively forget it would bepossible to go nearer; you have so little human interest aroundyou, that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in avery short time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go intoa wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on everyside; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up theirabode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much ofhumanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the staleexternals of man's life. These externals are as dead to us as somany formalities, and speak a dead language in our eyes and ears.They have no more meaning than an oath or a salutation. We are somuch accustomed to see married couples going to church of a Sundaythat we have clean forgotten what they represent; and novelists aredriven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish to show uswhat a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live for eachother.
One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than hisoutside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enoughlooking little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark ofsomething human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey,and came to me at once in envious sympathy. How he longed totravel! he told me. How he longed to be somewhere else, and seethe round world before he went into the grave! 'Here I am,' saidhe. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back againto 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. Hepressed 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 thishave been a brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies afterDrake? 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 hasthe wealth and glory.
I wonder if my friend is still driving the omnibus for the GrandCerf? Not very likely, I believe; for I think he was on the eve ofmutiny when we passed through, and perhaps our passage determinedhim for good. Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp,and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and sleep under trees, andsee the dawn and the sunset every day above a new horizon. I thinkI hear you say that it is a respectable position to drive anomnibus? Very well. What right has he who likes it not, to keepthose 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 afavourite amongst the rest of the company, what should I concludefrom that? Not to finish the dish against my stomach, I suppose.
Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does notrise superior to all considerations. I would not for a momentventure to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I willgo as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind,uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although itwere as respectable as the Church of England, the sooner a man isout of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.