It was obviously wise to leave the margin of this darkling wood and get down to the boat. It would never do to miss it, and be driven to crossing to Sahurs to tell them so. No! that wouldn't do: better catch the thing and be done with it. So I did; and had a journey of easy contemplation up to Rouen.
Next Sunday I got a "bike": it can be made to leave earlier than the boat. And the river-bank is more interesting than the middle-stream.
From Rouen to Sahurs the right bank of the Seine is bulwarked by a traversing limestone ridge, clothed with forest. But the river-side is escarped and precipitous, thrusting out its whiteness beneath the forest crest and, as a foil, casting up the châteaux and splendid maisons on the river level, with their embracing gardens and orchards.
This rich accumulation of colour—deep forest, gleaming cliff-side, red roof, grey mellow wall, and blooming garden and orchard, and white river road—is unforgettable, and perhaps unexcelled. Nothing finer you'll see in the whole Rhône Valley; and that is a bold saying.
The especial charm of a cycle is that you can stop and look. You can gaze as long as you like (as long as is consistent with the fact that Sunny Jim is at the other end of the journey) at this quaint half-timbered, gable-crowded maison standing in its graceful poplar-grove; at the sweet provincial youngsters playing on the road. You can lay up your machine and enter the rambling Normandy café squatting on the river-bank, with its groups of blue-clad soldiers en permission making the most of things with the bloused and pantalooned civilians and with their cider (cidre is the national drink of Normandy, as wine is of most other provinces) and you are greeted, in such a house, with the delicious open French friendliness which is so entrancing (by contrast) to most Englishmen. After their own national reticence, this is pleasant beyond description. Of some it is the undoing. The soldiers greet you, and you are adamantine if you don't sit at their table rather than alone. The girl who serves welcomes you like a brother. Quite sorry you are, at rising, you never came here before.... You push on with your wheel. On the slopes of the other bank they are getting in the harvest on the edge of the wood—some old men and many women and a handful of soldiers on leave who have forgotten the trenches.
There are soldiers with their families fishing on the bank beside you at intervals. You stop to talk to these. You can't resist sitting with them for a spell and kissing the little girls who nestle up. The basket that contains other things than bait and the catch is opened; you're a villain if you don't sip from that yellow bottle and take some bread and a handful of cherries....
Halfway to Sahurs, opposite the timbered island, you pass the German prisoners' camp, patrolled, beneath the barbed wire topping the wall, by those quaint, informal French sentries. They're in red-and-blue cap, red-and-blue tunic, red-and-blue breeches. They lounge and chat and dawdle, with their rifles slung across their backs, and their prodigiously long bayonets poking into the upper air. They appear casual enough, but they detest the generic German sufficiently to leave you confident that, however casual they may seem, he will not escape.
Farther down, you'll meet a gang of Boches road-making—fine, brawny, light-haired, blue-eyed, cheerful beggars they are. Obviously they don't aspire above their present lot so long as wars endure.
Four kilometres above Sahurs is the Napoleonic column marking the spot where the ashes of Bonaparte were landed between their transfer from the boat which brought them up the river to that which bore them to Paris. As I approached this column from above, Sunny Jim, on her wheel, approached it from Sahurs. Her friend Yvonne was with her (wonderful, in this land, is the celerity with which the barriers surrounding Christian names are thrown down!), and the dog.
The ride on to Sahurs is on a road that deflects from the river. It is over-arched with elms continuously. Thérèse (that's her name) calls it la Cathédrale: and the roof of branches aloft is like the groined roof of a cathedral.