This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much
as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and
heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the
Commercial Traveller from Marseilles.
He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the
cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was
extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large,
his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of
the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He
came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent
of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in
dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);
then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the
memory of such a revelation.
For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my
wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the
Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black;
slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,
black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid
gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet
lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.
That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of
France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.
It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught
the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.
I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.
When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing
water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:
'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So
on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such
and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so
many years and so many yards, ...' &c., and so forth ... exactly like
a mill.
I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the
Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the
villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.
He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with
the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most
unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was
off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such
money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.
It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds
left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when,
with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting
continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and
pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France,
and I was fairly in a strange country.
The valley through which I was now passing resembled that of the
lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like
a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there,
steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green grass
and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual
woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and
upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this
winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the
Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.
I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of
novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered
France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully
tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and
marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.
Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees.
I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through
the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French
neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as
hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds
and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the
Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow
Water'.
I was wondering what its name might be, and how far I stood from
Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across
the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the
river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had
been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short
cut up through the forest over a spur of hill - a short cut most
legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used - and I
walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods
and beneath small, dripping trees.
