The Historical Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc

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СКАЧАТЬ at the close of a difficult task: how they divide it up in lengths in their minds, how they count numbers, how they begin to solve problems in mental arithmetic: I tried them all. Then I thought of a new one, which is really excellent, and which I recommend to the whole world. It is to vary the road, suddenly taking now the fields, now the river, but only occasionally the turnpike. This last lap was very well suited for such a method. The valley had become more like a wide and shallow trench than ever. The hills on either side were low and exactly even. Up the middle of it went the river, the canal and the road, and these two last had only a field between them; now broad, now narrow.

      First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus; nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.

      The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and deplorable road--that a town should be called 'Charms'.

      Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried, have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I remember it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such names, as--Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel, that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list, would answer: 'There I was on such and such a day; this I came to after such and such a run; and that other is my home.' But it is not his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound of the names. He feels the accent of them, and all the men who live between Hind-head and the Channel know these names stand for Eden; the noise is enough to prove it. So it is also with the hidden valleys of the lie de France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in those shadows he grows dreamy--yet they are within a walk of Paris.

      But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes is that it hands down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from his own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They say the Arabs do this; calling one place 'the rest of the warriors', and another 'the end', and another 'the surprise of the horses': let those who know them speak for it. I at least know that in the west of the Cotentin (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish women discovered the just epithet, and that you have 'St Mary on the Hill' and 'High Town under the Wind' and 'The Borough over the Heath', which are to-day exactly what their name describes them. If you doubt that England has such descriptive names, consider the great Truth that at one junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of stagnant waters and treeless, stonewalled fields threatens you with experience and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into your carriage and to chant like Charon, 'Change here for Ashton under the Wood, Moreton on the Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the Wold.'

      Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve what its forgotten son found so wonderful in it. For at luncheon there a great commercial traveller told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its breweries, and that he thought it of little account. Still even in Charmes I found one marvellous corner of a renaissance house, which I drew; but as I have lost the drawing, let it go.

      When I came out from the inn of Charmes the heat was more terrible than ever, and the prospect of a march in it more intolerable. My head hung, I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly thoughts, which were really (had I known it) good angels. I began to look out anxiously for woods, but saw only long whitened wall glaring in the sun, or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded by wooden palisades which the owners had put there. But in a little time (now I had definitely yielded to temptation) I found a thicket.

      You must know that if you yield to entertaining a temptation, there is the opportunity presented to you like lightning. A theologian told me this, and it is partly true: but not of Mammon or Belphegor, or whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency (I can see his face from here): for how many have yielded to the Desire of Riches and professed themselves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get an opportunity worth a farthing till they died? Like those two beggars that Rabelais tells of, one of whom wished for all the gold that would pay for all the merchandise that had ever been sold in Paris since its first foundation, and the other for as much gold as would go into all the sacks that could be sewn by all the needles (and those of the smallest size) that could be crammed into Notre-Dame from the floor to the ceiling, filling the smallest crannies. Yet neither had a crust that night to rub his gums with.

      Whatever Devil it is, however, that tempts men to repose--and for my part I believe him to be rather an Aeon than a Devil: that is, a good-natured fellow working on his own account neither good nor ill--whatever being it is, it certainly suits one's mood, for I never yet knew a man determined to be lazy that had not ample opportunity afforded him, though he were poorer than the cure of Maigre, who formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were too insignificant to sell singly. A man can always find a chance for doing nothing as amply and with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the world allows, and so to me (whether it was there before I cannot tell, and if it came miraculously, so much the more amusing) appeared this thicket. It was to the left of the road; a stream ran through it in a little ravine; the undergrowth was thick beneath its birches, and just beyond, on the plain that bordered it, were reapers reaping in a field. I went into it contentedly and slept till evening my third sleep; then, refreshed by the cool wind that went before the twilight, I rose and took the road again, but I knew I could not go far.

      I was now past my fortieth mile, and though the heat had gone, yet my dead slumber had raised a thousand evils. I had stiffened to lameness, and had fallen into the mood when a man desires companionship and the talk of travellers rather than the open plain. But (unless I went backward, which was out of the question) there was nowhere to rest in for a long time to come. The next considerable village was Thayon, which is called 'Thayon of the Vosges', because one is nearing the big hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile after mile.

      But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and then my left knee oppressed me with a sudden pain. I attempted to relieve it by leaning on my right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in medicine which I will propose to the scientists. For when those excellent men have done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where the soul is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that you cannot relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some other; and so I exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. (But, as you shall hear, a pilgrimage is not wholly subject to material laws, for when I came to Épinal next day I went into a shop which, whatever it was to the profane, appeared to me as a chemist's shop, where I bought a bottle of some stuff called 'balm', and rubbing myself with it was instantly cured.)

      Then I looked down from the bridge across the plain, and saw, a long way off beyond the railway, the very ugly factory village of Thayon, and reached it at last, not without noticing that the people were standing branches of trees before their doors, and the little children noisily helping to tread the stems firmly into the earth. They told me it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so proved to me that religion, which is as old as these valleys, would last out their inhabiting men. Even here, in a place made by a great laundry, a modern industrial row of tenements, all the world was putting СКАЧАТЬ