There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen—early
and late—who were already beating the linen
in their floating lavatory on the river. They
were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged
their arms boldly in, and seemed not to feel the shock.
It would be dispiriting to me, this early beginning
and first cold dabble of a most dispiriting day’s
work. But I believe they would have been as
unwilling to change days with us as we could be to
change with them. They crowded to the door to
watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon
the river; and shouted heartily after us till we were
through the bridge.
CHANGED TIMES
There is a sense in which those mists never rose from
off our journey; and from that time forth they lie
very densely in my note-book. As long as the
Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people’s
doors, and we could hold a conversation with natives
in the riparian fields. But now that it had
grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at
a distance. It was the same difference as between
a great public highway and a country by-path that
wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now
lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions;
we had floated into civilised life, where people pass
without salutation. In sparsely inhabited places,
we make all we can of each encounter; but when it comes
to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless
we have trodden on a man’s toes. In these
waters we were no longer strange birds, and nobody
supposed we had travelled farther than from the last
town. I remember, when we came into L’Isle
Adam, for instance, how we met dozens of pleasure-boats
outing it for the afternoon, and there was nothing
to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur,
except, perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail.
The company in one boat actually thought they recognised
me for a neighbour. Was there ever anything
more wounding? All the romance had come down
to that. Now, on the upper Oise, where nothing
sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair of canoeists
could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were
strange and picturesque intruders; and out of people’s
wonder sprang a sort of light and passing intimacy
all along our route. There is nothing but tit-for-tat
in this world, though sometimes it be a little difficult
to trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves,
and there has never yet been a settling-day since
things were. You get entertainment pretty much
in proportion as you give. As long as we were
a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed
like a quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of
amusement in return; but as soon as we sank into commonplace
ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted.
And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world
is dull to dull persons.
