Within an hour we had begun our journey and were upon the open sea. Fred could scarcely contain his excitement. “It is very boisterous, sir. My stomach hits the floor and then comes up into my mouth.”
“You should sit, Fred. You will be ill.”
“Not me, sir. I have ridden in my father’s cart. The streets of London are worse than any sea. Look, sir. Over there. There is the whale I mentioned.” I looked out of the porthole, but I could see nothing through the spray. “Did you not see that creature following us? It popped its head in and out of the water.” I looked again, and for a moment thought that I glimpsed something. But it had gone beneath the waves.
“It was a piece of timber, Fred. A plank.”
Bysshe came into our cabin. “Mary is unwell,” he said. “She wishes to be left with Lizzie. I have given her a powder, but the sea is very high.”
“High and low at the same time,” Fred said. “It is a regular seesaw.”
“But we are making progress, I think. Come and sit with me, Bysshe.”
“Yes. We will discuss old tales of sea adventures. We will relive the journeys to Virginia and the Barbadoes. We will hail the sapphire ocean!” Bysshe had a wonderful ability to rise above circumstances and, as we sat in the tossing cabin, he entertained me and Fred with the tales of sea journeys he had read as a child. He recited with vigour the lines from the Odyssey where Odysseus sails up the narrow strait between the islands of Scylla and Charybdis where the sea “seethed and bubbled in utter turmoil, and high overhead the spray fell on the tops of the cliffs.” It was Bysshe’s own translation, and I am sure that he composed it as he went along.
There was a sudden knock on the door of the cabin, and Lizzie stood before us. She gave a little curtsy. “Please to tell you, Mr. Shelley, that my mistress is a deal better and craves a little bit of your company.”
“I shall be there, Lizzie, before you are gone.” He gave me a hasty adieu, and retired.
Fred and I sat in silence, Fred whistling as he looked out of the porthole. “Do refrain from that noise, Fred. It is giving me a headache.”
“There goes that whale again.”
“Are you sure? I am not convinced that whales frequent these waters.”
“Where there is water, sir, there is a whale. Look.”
I went over to the porthole. “I can see nothing, Fred. You are dreaming. Will you please seek out the captain, and ask him how much longer we will be at sea?”
“He is an old cuffin,” Fred said on his return from the captain’s quarters. “A matter of hours, he says. How many hours, I says. Am I God, he says. Far from it, I says. Then he slams his door shut.”
It was indeed a matter of hours-hours more than I had anticipated, since for a while we lay becalmed in the wallowing sea. Eventually Bysshe came into the cabin. “We are approaching land,” he said. “The seamen are scampering about.”
There was in fact some delay, and our ship was becalmed just before we reached the harbour; but a sudden gust was admirably caught by the captain, and we reached our moorings. There was a line of various coaches and carriages along the dockside, some already taken and some waiting to be hired. Mary, with what I soon discovered to be her usual expedition, went up to one of the drivers and engaged in some form of bargain: we had agreed to hire a carriage to take us through Holland and part of Germany, even though Bysshe had expressed a desire to travel through France and Italy. Yet his wish was quite ignored by Mary, and it was agreed with the driver that we would ride through the plains of Holland before going onward to Cologne. “I have heard from others of ruined France,” Mary said as we settled in the carriage. “The Cossacks have spared nothing. The villages are burned, and the people beg for bread. The auberges are filthy, too. There is disease everywhere. Really, Bysshe, France is not the country of your imagination.”
“No country ever can be,” he replied. “But I live in infinite hope.”
The five of us were comfortably accommodated in the vehicle, and there was a stair to a seat on the roof in case any of us should prefer the air. Lizzie and Fred were engaged in an elaborate charade of unconcern; they did not speak to each other, nor even glance at one another. Fred sat next to me, by the window in one corner of the carriage, looking out at the passing landscape; Lizzie sat beside Mary, in the opposite corner, busily engaged in the same pastime. The landscape was uniform enough in this part of Holland, with the occasional dwelling or village that might have been drawn by the pen of Van Ruysdael-except for the fact that they were invariably dirty, ill-kept and unrepaired. I pointed this out to Bysshe, who preferred to dwell with rapture on the view of the Alps that we would find at our destination. “Humankind needs grandeur and solitariness,” he said. “Not these placid pastures.”
“There is much to be said for quietness,” I replied.
“It is the quietness of decay,” he said. “The spirit of the age has passed on. Now it belongs to the hero, to the individual soul facing its destiny.” Then he began to quote from one of his own poems, declaiming the words out of the carriage window as we passed through one Dutch hamlet:
“I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt
His presence flow and mingle through my blood
Till it became his life, and his grew mine,
And I was thus absorbed, until it passed.”
Our journey continued across Holland, and at last we ascended the road towards Cologne. The air was fresher here, close to the Eifel mountains, and we were entertained by fresh prospects of heath and forest. I knew the juniper and the beech from my childhood days, but I had never known them to grow in such profusion: here, too, were great outcrops of stone that are a sure token of the mountains beyond. We rested in Cologne, in a small lodging house close to the principal square. “I will not visit the cathedral,” Bysshe announced. “I detest cathedrals. They are monuments to pain and folly. They are tributes to superstition. Cold and gloomy places.”
“You will walk with me through the markets,” Mary replied. “The prosperity of the people will not disturb you.”
“Not at all. Trade is a great solvent in the eventual union of mankind. It is a general blessing.” So we set out, on the following morning, on a tour through the mercantile districts of Cologne close to the river. The old merchants’ houses there reminded me of Geneva, and I was seized by a fervent longing to return to the place of my birth. I consented willingly, therefore, when Bysshe proposed that we take a boat upon the Rhine as far as Strasbourg. From there we would hire a coach to Geneva itself.
My native tongue was now of use, and I bargained with the captain of a barge; his main trade was in conveying cloths from the East to the markets of Cologne and elsewhere, and he was about to return to Strasbourg after delivering a large consignment. Our route would take us through Mainz and Mannheim before reaching our destination. We purchased cold provisions, and made ourselves pretty comfortable for a journey that would last several days. Mary was in high spirits as we set off from the jetty at Cologne. “It is believed,” she said, “that the Rhine and the Thames were conjoined in some distant age of the earth. They formed one mighty river.”
“That is Thomas Burnet’s theory,” Bysshe replied. “How can it ever be proved?”
“Poets need no proof, Bysshe. You always laud the power of the imagination. Of intuition.”
“True, Mary dear. I declare this to be the Thames. We are sailing past Oxford on our way to Richmond and the Tower!”
We made steady progress along the Rhine, and I must say that I marvelled at the landscape; along some stretches of the river were extensive vineyards and gently sloping hills, where the virtues of calm nature were preserved. But these were succeeded by rugged mounts, and crags, and precipices, where castles had been erected among rocks and torrents. “There,” said Bysshe, pointing to one of them, “is tyranny visible. Every stone is fashioned out of blood. It is built upon foundations of suffering.”