Richard Holmes – Footsteps (страница 14)
At Cassagnas, “a black village on the mountainside”—again that note of drained colour—he dined with the local gendarme and a travelling merchant at the inn. There was some gossip of a renegade Catholic curé, who had given up his ministry and “taken to his bosom” the local schoolmistress; the villagers, though almost all Protestant, showed little sympathy for the man’s predicament, despite the fact that their own Protestant priests were allowed and indeed encouraged to marry. The general sentiment seemed to be that “it is a bad idea for a man to go back on his engagements”—even if it was such an unnatural one as Catholic celibacy. Stevenson remarks wryly that “perhaps the bad idea was to enter into them at the first” and continues with a brief, rather hazy passage about the “holy simplicity” of physical desires and needs. “The world gives liberally of things to eat; it is all over spouting fountains; and a man need not travel very far ere he finds a woman to whom his soul can cling. If he can but lay aside some dismal ascetic standards, and a few hollow aspirations …”
But he was pleased to find that both the policeman and the merchant were more than a little shocked to discover that he had been sleeping in the open. There was talk of wolves and thieves—“the English always have long purses”—and general head-shaking. To all Stevenson’s smiling and shrugging—” ‘God,’ said I, ‘is everywhere’”—the merchant replied in grave, flattering disapproval:
Without further delay, he then crossed back over the Mimente to the southern side of the valley and began to climb the ragged path that leads steeply up through “sliding stone and heather tufts” to the huge, long escarpment known as Mont Mars. It took him nearly all afternoon to get over the crest and discover the astonishing panorama of hills on the other side, dominated by the Plan de Fontmort where the Camisards fought their last, bloody and suicidal battle.
To me this was the single most impressive view of the entire journey. I scrawled wildly in my diary:
Like gasping for breath in a rolling blue sea of hills going southwards as far as the sky and further—being washed entirely away by it all—exalted and lonely as hell—stood on a rock of the heathery col drinking toast to RLS—tin cup held up to horizon—somewhere he must have heard—black cicadas exploding all round with shiny red wings in the sunlight.
Obscurely I felt that the whole trip “made sense beyond metaphor of explanation”, in that high, bright, windy place of the Cévennes. I lay for hours on my back in the heather watching the clouds troop endlessly and majestically overhead in the blue. If you were dead and buried, I thought, that is how life would go on around you; that is how Stevenson would see it. And of course I recited his epitaph, known by heart, to generations of English children like me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Stevenson arrived on the edge of Mont Mars when it was already late in the afternoon. He was deeply moved too by the realisation that his journey must be near its end; he could not continue it much longer. “It was perhaps the wildest view of my journey; peak upon peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging southward, channelled and guttered by winter streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts and here and there breaking out into a coronal of cliffs.” The sun was setting behind the Plan de Fontmort and the darkness was filling up the valleys. “Away across the highest peaks, to the south-west, lay Alais, my destination.” An old shepherd hobbling on a pair of sticks and wearing a black cap of liberty, “as if in honour of his neighbourhood to the grave”, directed him to the road for St Germain-de-Calberte.
Here Stevenson was to spend his final night, and his journal ends with a description of the long descent to the village, through high terraces of chestnut trees, as the dusk fell and the moon came up. The road glimmered white, “carpeted with noiseless dust”, and Stevenson drank mouthfuls of Volnay wine until he was no longer conscious of his limbs. He arrived just as the landlady of the inn was putting her chickens to bed. “The fire was already out and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; quarter of an hour later and I must have gone supperless to roost.”
He met no one on this last, light-headed stretch; but he heard a voice, the voice of a woman singing, somewhere below him through the rustling chestnut trees. In a sense, of course, it was Fanny’s voice, and he wished he could have responded. “I could barely catch the words, but there was something about a
In the
The following day, Thursday, 3 October, he took the carriage road over the Col de St Pierre to St Jean-du-Gard. Here Modestine was declared unfit to travel by the farrier, and Stevenson found his journey had come abruptly to an end. His relief is evident. He sold his “lady friend” for thirty-five francs, boxed up his belongings and caught the afternoon diligence—“now eager to reach Alais for my letters”. His envoi is light-hearted: “It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement. I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but now she was gone—‘And oh! The difference to me!’” This time the reference is explicit, to Wordsworth’s
I spent my last night under one of those huge spreading chestnut trees, off the old coaching road—now no more than a track—beyond St Germain-de-Calberte. I had walked along for an hour in the moonlight, after supper at the
I walked over the Col de St Pierre in six hours, and came down to St Jean-du-Gard, a modern market town on the high road between Ales and Millau, no longer in the magic
The sense of having been away, somewhere quite else, was extraordinarily strong: my first experience of biographer’s “time-warp”. I hitch-hiked home to my vine-farmers, in the south-east beyond Nîmes, riding in the open back of a big lorry carrying red Calor-gas cans. Facing backwards, my pack swaying at my feet, the cans clanging like sea-buoys, the wind plucking at Le Brun, I watched the dark-brown line of the Cévennes drop below the north-west horizon like “a sea-coast in Bohemia”. My head was full of poems I would write.
Stevenson published his