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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: From The Log of The "Velsa"
-
-Author: Arnold Bennett
-
-Illustrator: E. A. Rickards
-             Arnold Bennett
-
-Release Date: July 15, 2017 [EBook #55113]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM THE LOG OF THE "VELSA" ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
-
-By Arnold Bennett
-
-Pictures By E. A. Rickards
-
-And A Frontispiece By The Author
-
-New York: The Century Co.
-
-1914
-
-
-[Illustration: 0001]
-
-[Illustration: 0008]
-
-[Illustration: 0009]
-
-
-
-
-FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
-
-
-
-
-PART I HOLLAND
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I--VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
-
-THE skipper, who, in addition to being a yachtsman, is a Dutchman,
-smiled with calm assurance as we approached the Dutch frontier in the
-August evening over the populous water of the canal which leads from
-Ghent to Terneuzen. He could not abide Belgium, possibly because it
-is rather like Holland in some ways. In his opinion the bureaucrats of
-Belgium did not understand yachts and the respect due to them, whereas
-the bureaucrats of Holland did. Holland was pictured for me as a
-paradise where a yacht with a seventy-foot mast never had to wait a
-single moment for a bridge to be swung open. When I inquired about
-custom-house formalities, I learned that a Dutch custom-house did not
-exist for a craft flying the sacred blue ensign of the British Naval
-Reserve. And it was so. Merely depositing a ticket and a tip into the
-long-handled butterfly-net dangled over our deck by the bridge-man as we
-passed, we sailed straight into Holland, and no word said! But we knew
-immediately that we were in another country--a country cleaner and
-neater and more garnished even than Belgium. The Terneuzen Canal,
-with its brickwork banks and its villages “finished” to the last tile,
-reminded me of the extravagant, oily perfection of the main tracks
-of those dandiacal railroads, the North Western in England and the
-Pennsylvania in America. The stiff sailing breeze was at length
-favorable. We set the mainsail unexceptionably; and at once, with the
-falling dusk, the wind fell, and the rain too. We had to depend again
-on our erratic motor, with all Holland gazing at us. Suddenly the whole
-canal was lit up on both sides by electricity. We responded with our
-lights. The exceedingly heavy rain drove me into the saloon to read
-Dostoyevsky.
-
-[Illustration: 0019]
-
-At eight P. M. I was dug up out of the depths of Dostoyevsky in order
-to see my first Dutch harbor. Rain poured through the black night. There
-was a plashing of invisible wavelets below, utter darkness above, and
-a few forlorn lights winking at vast distances. I was informed that we
-were moored in the yacht-basin of Terneuzen. I remained calm. Had we
-been moored in the yacht-basin of Kamchatka, the smell of dinner would
-still have been issuing from the forecastle-hatch, the open page of
-Dostoyevsky would still have invited me through the saloon skylight, and
-the amiable ray of the saloon lamp would still have glinted on the piano
-and on the binnacle with impartial affection. Herein lies an advantage
-of yachting over motoring. I redescended without a regret, without an
-apprehension. Already the cook was displacing Dostoyevsky in favor of a
-white table-cloth and cutlery.
-
-The next morning we were at large on the billow’s of the West Schelde,
-a majestic and enraged stream, of which Flushing is the guardian
-and Antwerp the mistress. The rain had in no wise lost heart. With
-a contrary wind and a choppy sea, the yacht had a chance to show her
-qualities and defects. She has both. Built to the order of a Dutch
-baron rather less than twenty years ago, she is flat-bottomed, with
-lee-boards, and follows closely the lines of certain very picturesque
-Dutch fishing-smacks. She has a length of just over fifty-five feet and
-a beam of just over fifteen feet. Her tonnage is fifty-one, except when
-dues have to be paid, on which serious occasions it mysteriously
-shrinks to twenty-one net. Yachtsmen are always thus modest. Her rig is,
-roughly, that of a cutter, with a deliciously curved gaff that is the
-secret envy of all real cutters.
-
-Her supreme advantage, from my point of view, is that she has well over
-six feet of head-room in the saloon and in the sleeping-cabins. And,
-next, that the owner’s bed is precisely similar to the celestial bed
-which he enjoyed on a certain unsurpassed American liner. Further, she
-carries a piano and an encyclopedia, two necessaries of life. I may say
-that I have never known another yacht that carried an encyclopedia in
-more than a score of volumes. Again, she is eternal. She has timbers
-that recall those of the _Constitution_. There are Dutch eel-boats on
-the Thames which look almost exactly like her at a distance, and which
-were launched before Victoria came to the throne. She has a cockpit
-in which Hardy might have kissed Nelson. She sails admirably with a
-moderate wind on the quarter. More important still, by far, she draws
-only three feet eight inches, and hence can often defy charts, and slide
-over sands where deep-draft boats would rightly fear to tread; she has
-even been known to sail through fields.
-
-Possibly for some folk her chief attribute would be that, once seen, she
-cannot be forgotten. She is a lovely object, and not less unusual than
-lovely. She is smart also, but nothing more dissimilar to the average
-smart, conventional English or American yacht can well be conceived. She
-is a magnet for the curious. When she goes under a railway bridge
-while a train is going over it, the engine-driver, of no matter what
-nationality, will invariably risk the lives of all his passengers in
-order to stare at her until she is out of sight. This I have noticed
-again and again. The finest compliment her appearance ever received was
-paid by a schoolboy, who, after staring at her for about a quarter of an
-hour as she lay at a wharf at Kingston-on-Thames, sidled timidly up to
-me as I leaned in my best maritime style over the quarter, and asked,
-“Please, sir, is this a training brig?” Romance gleamed in that boy’s
-eye.
-
-As for her defects, I see no reason why I should catalogue them at
-equal length. But I admit that, to pay for her headroom, she has no
-promenade-deck for the owner and his friends to “pace,” unless they are
-prepared to exercise themselves on the roof of the saloon. Also that,
-owing to her shallowness, she will ignobly blow off when put up to the
-wind. Indeed, the skipper himself, who has proved that she will live in
-any sea, describes her progress under certain conditions as “one mile
-ahead and two miles to leeward”; but he would be hurt if he were taken
-seriously. Her worst fault is due to her long, overhanging prow, which
-pounds into a head sea with a ruthlessness that would shake the funnels
-off a torpedo-boat. You must not press her. Leave her to do her best,
-and she will do it splendidly; but try to bully her, and she will bury
-her nose and defy you.
-
-That morning on the wide, broad Schelde, with driving rain, and an
-ever-freshening northwester worrying her bows, she was not pressed,
-and she did not sink; but her fierce gaiety was such as to keep us all
-alive. She threshed the sea. The weather multiplied, until the half-inch
-wire rope that is the nerve between the wheel and the rudder snapped,
-and we were at the mercy, etc. While the skipper, with marvelous
-resource and rapidity, was improvising a new gear, it was discovered
-amid general horror, that the piano had escaped from its captivity, and
-was lying across the saloon table. Such an incident counts in the life
-of an amateur musician. Still, under two hours later, I was playing the
-same piano again in the tranquillity of Flushing lock.
-
-[Illustration: 0026]
-
-It was at Middelburg that the leak proved its existence. Middelburg is
-an architecturally delightful town even in heavy, persevering rain and
-a northwest gale. It lies on the canal from Flushing to Veere, and its
-belfry had been a beacon to us nearly all the way down the Schelde from
-Temeuzen. Every English traveler stares at its renowned town-hall; and
-indeed the whole place, having been till recently the haunt of more or
-less honest English racing tipsters and book-makers, must be endeared to
-the British sporting character. We went forth into the rain and into the
-town, skirting canals covered with timber-rafts, suffering the lively
-brutishness of Dutch infants, and gazing at the bare-armed young women
-under their umbrellas. We also found a goodish restaurant.
-
-When we returned at nine P. M., the deck-hand, a fatalistic philosopher,
-was pumping. He made a sinister figure in the dark. And there was the
-sound of the rain on our umbrellas, and the sound of the pumped water
-pouring off our decks down into the unseen canal. I asked him why he
-was pumping at that hour. He answered that the ship leaked. It did. The
-forecastle floor was under an inch of water, and water was pushing up
-the carpet of the starboard sleeping-cabin, and all the clean linen in
-the linen-locker was drenched. In a miraculous and terrifying vision,
-which changed the whole aspect of yachting as a recreation, I saw the
-yacht at the bottom of the canal. I should not have had this vision
-had the skipper been aboard; but the skipper was ashore, unfolding the
-beauties of Holland to the cook. I knew the skipper would explain
-and cure the leak in an instant. A remarkable man, Dutch only by the
-accident of birth and parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable
-as a camel, adventurous as Columbus, and as prudent as J. Pierpont
-Morgan, he had never failed me. Half his life had been spent on that
-yacht, and the other half on the paternal barge. He had never lived
-regularly in a house. Consequently he was an expert of the very first
-order on the behavior of Dutch barges under all conceivable conditions.
-While the ship deliberately sank and sank, the pumping monotonously
-continued, and I waited in the saloon for him to come back. Dostoyevsky
-had no hold on me whatever. The skipper would not come back: he declined
-utterly to come back; he was lost in the mazy vastness of Middelburg.
-
-Then I heard his voice forward. He had arrived in silence. “I hear our
-little ship has got a leak, sir,” he said when I joined the group of
-professional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick rain that
-veiled even gas-lamps. I was disappointed. The skipper was depressed,
-sentimentally depressed, and he was quite at a loss. Was the leak caused
-by the buffetings of the Schelde, by the caprices of the piano, by the
-stress of working through crowded locks? He knew not. But he would swear
-that the leak was not in the bottom, because the bottom was double. The
-one thing to do was to go to Veere, and put the ship on a grid that he
-was aware of in the creek there, and find the leak. And, further, there
-were a lot of other matters needing immediate attention. The bob-stay
-was all to pieces, both pumps were defective, and the horn for rousing
-lethargic bridge-men would not have roused a rabbit. All which meant for
-him an expedition to Flushing, that bustling port!
-
-The ship was pumped dry. But the linen was not dry. I wanted to spread
-it out in the saloon; but the skipper would not permit such an outrage
-on the sanctity of the saloon, he would not even let the linen rest in
-the saloon lavatory (sometimes called the bath-room). It must be hidden
-like a shame in the forecastle. So the crew retired for the night to the
-sodden, small forecastle amid soaked linen, while I reposed in dry
-and comfortable spaciousness, but worried by those sociological
-considerations which are the mosquitos of a luxurious age--and which
-ought to be. None but a tyrant convinced of the divine rights of riches
-could be always at ease on board a small yacht; on board a large one,
-as in a house, the contrasts are less point-blank. And yet must small
-yachts he abolished? Absurd idea! Civilization is not so simple an
-affair as it seems to politicians perorating before immense audiences.
-
-Owing to the obstinacy of water in finding its own level, we went to bed
-more than once during that night, and I thought of selling the ship and
-giving to the poor. What a declension from the glory of the original
-embarkation!
-
-The next afternoon, through tempests and an eternal downpour, we reached
-Veere, at the other end of the canal. Veere is full of Scotch history
-and of beauty; it has a cathedral whose interior is used by children as
-a field, a gem of a town-hall, and various attractions less striking;
-but for us it existed simply as a place where there was a grid, to serve
-the purpose of a dry-dock. On the following morning we got the yacht
-onto the grid, and then began to wait for the tide to recede. During
-its interminable recession, we sat under a shed of the shipyard, partly
-sheltered from the constant rain, and labored to produce abominable
-watercolors of the yacht, with the quay and the cathedral and the
-town-hall as a background. And then some one paddling around the yacht
-in the dinghy perceived a trickle out of a seam. The leak! It was naught
-but the slight starting of a seam! No trace of other damage. In an hour
-it had been repaired with oakum and hammers, and covered with a plaster
-of copper. The steering-gear was repaired. The pumps were repaired.
-The bobstay was repaired. The water-color looked less abominable in the
-discreet, kindly light of the saloon. The state of human society seemed
-less volcanically dangerous. God was in His heaven. “I suppose you’d
-like to start early to-morrow morning, sir,” said the skipper, whose one
-desire in life is to go somewhere else. I said I should.
-
-I went ashore with the skipper to pay bills--four gulden for repairs and
-three gulden for the use of the grid. It would have been much more but
-for my sagacity in having a Dutch skipper. The charming village proved
-to be virtually in the possession of one of those formidable English
-families whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-course is near.
-They ran ecstatically about the quay with sheets of Whatman until the
-heavy rain melted them. The owner of the grid lived in a large house
-with a most picturesque façade. Inside it was all oilcloth, red
-mahogany, and crimson plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright
-was an old, jolly man, with white whiskers spreading like a peacock’s
-tail. He gave us cigars to pass the time while he accomplished the
-calligraphy of a receipt. He was a man sarcastic about his women (of
-whom he had many), because they would not let him use the _voor-kammer_
-(front room) to write receipts in. I said women were often the same
-in England, and he gave a short laugh at England. Nevertheless, he
-was proud of his women, because out of six daughters five had found
-husbands, a feat of high skill in that island of Walcheren, where women
-far outnumber men.
-
-Outside, through the mullioned window, I saw a young matron standing
-nonchalant and unprotected in the heavy rain. She wore an elaborate
-local costume, with profuse gilt ornaments. The effect of these Dutch
-costumes is to suggest that the wearer carries only one bodice, thin and
-armless, but ten thousand skirts. Near the young matron was a girl
-of seven or eight, dressed in a fashion precisely similar, spectacle
-exquisite to regard, but unsatisfactory to think about. Some day all
-these women will put on long sleeves and deprive themselves of a few
-underskirts, and all the old, jolly men with spreading white beards will
-cry out that women are unsexed and that the end of the world is nigh. In
-another house I bought a fisherman’s knitted blue jersey of the finest
-quality, as being the sole garment capable of keeping me warm in a Dutch
-summer. I was told that the girl who knitted it received only half a
-gulden for her labor. Outrageous sweating, which ought never to have
-been countenanced. Still, I bought the jersey.
-
-At six-thirty next day we were under way--a new ship, as it seemed to
-me. Yachts may have leaks, but we were under way, and the heavenly
-smell of bacon was in the saloon; and there had been no poring over
-time-tables, no tipping of waiters, no rattling over cobbles in
-omnibuses, no waiting in arctic railway-stations, no pugnacity for
-corner seats, no checking of baggage. I was wakened by the vibration
-of the propeller; I clad myself in a toga, and issued forth to laugh
-good-by at sleeping Veere--no other formalities. And all along the quay,
-here and there, I observed an open window among the closed ones. Each
-open window denoted for me an English water-colorist sleeping, even as
-she or he had rushed about the quay, with an unconcealed conviction of
-spiritual, moral, and physical superiority. It appeared to me monstrous
-that these English should be so ill bred as to inflict their insular
-notions about fresh air on a historic Continental town. Every open
-window was an arrogant sneer at Dutch civilization, was it not? Surely
-they could have slept with their windows closed for a few weeks! Or, if
-not, they might have chosen Amsterdam instead of Veere, and practised
-their admirable Englishness on the “Victorian Tea-Room” in that city.
-
-[Illustration: 0035]
-
-We passed into the Veeregat and so into the broad Roompot Channel, and
-left Veere. It was raining heavily, but gleams near the horizon allowed
-me to hope that before the day was out I might do another water-color.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II--DUTCH LEISURE
-
-EVERY tourist knows that Holland is one of the historic cradles of
-political freedom, and also a chain of cities which are in effect
-museums of invaluable art. The voyager in a little ship may learn that
-in addition to all this Holland is the home of a vast number of plain
-persons who are under the necessity of keeping themselves alive seven
-days a week, and whose experiments in the adventure of living have
-an interest quite equal to the interest of ancient art. To judge that
-adventure in its final aspect, one should see Holland on a Sunday, and
-not the Holland of the cities, but of the little towns.
-
-We came one Sunday morning to a place called Zieriksee, on an island to
-the north of the East Schelde. Who has heard of Zieriksee? Nevertheless,
-Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people prosecute the adventure
-therein without the aid of museums and tourists. At first, from the
-mouth of its private canal, it seems to be a huge, gray tower surrounded
-by tiniest doll’s-houses with vermilion roofs; and as you approach, the
-tower waxes, until the stones of it appear sufficient to build the
-whole borough; then it wanes, and is lost in the town, as all towers
-ultimately are. The cobbled quay and streets were empty as we moored.
-And in an instant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth,--men and
-boys and girls, but few women,--staring, glaring, giggling, gabbling,
-pushing. Their inquisitiveness had no shame, no urbanity. Their cackle
-deafened. They worried the _Velsa_ like starving wolves worrying a deer.
-The _Velsa_ was a godsend, unhoped for in the enormous and cruel tedium
-which they had created for themselves. To escape them we forced our way
-ashore, and trod the clean, deathlike, feet-torturing streets. One shop
-was open; we entered it, and were supplied with cigarettes by two polite
-and gracious very old women who knew no English. On emerging from this
-paganism, we met a long, slow-slouching, gloomy procession of sardonic
-human beings,--not a pretty woman among them, not a garment that was
-comely or unclean or unrespectable, not a smile,--the great, faithful
-congregation marching out of the great church. Here was the life of
-leisure in Holland as distinguished from the week-day life of industry.
-It was a tragic spectacle. When we returned to the yacht, the other
-congregation was still around it. And it was still there, just as noisy
-and boorish, when we left several hours later. And it would still have
-been there if we had remained till midnight. The phenomenon of that
-crowd, wistful in its touching desire for distraction, was a serious
-criticism of the leaders of men in Holland. As we slid away, we could
-see the crowd rapidly dissolving into the horror of its original ennui.
-I asked the cook, a cockney, what he thought of Zieriksee.
-
-His face lightened to a cheerful smile.
-
-“Rather a nice sort of place, sir. More like England.”
-
-[Illustration: 0040]
-
-The same afternoon we worked up the Schelde in a dead calm to Zijpe. The
-rain had pretermitted for the first time, and the sun was hot. Zijpe
-is a village, a haven, a dike, and a junction of train and steamer. The
-village lies about a mile inland. The haven was pretty full of barges
-laid up for Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the railway-station
-and the landing-stage, a multitude of at least a thousand people
-were strolling to and fro or sitting on the wet grass, all in their
-formidable Sabbath best. We joined them, in order, if possible, to learn
-the cause of the concourse; but the mystery remained for one hour and a
-half in the eventless expanse of the hot afternoon, when the train came
-in over the flat, green leagues of landscape. We then understood. The
-whole of Zijpe had turned out to see the afternoon train come in! It was
-a simple modest Dutch local train, making a deal of noise and dust,
-and bearing perhaps a score of passengers. But it marked the grand
-climacteric of leisured existence at Zijpe. We set off to the village,
-and discovered a village deserted, and a fair-ground, with all its
-booths and circuses swathed up in gray sheeting. Scarcely a soul! The
-spirit of romance had pricked them all to the railway-station to see the
-train come in!
-
-Making a large circuit, we reached again the river and the dike, and
-learned what a dike is in Holland. From the top of it we could look down
-the chimneys of houses on the landward side. The population was now
-on the dike, promenading in magnificent solemnity and self-control.
-Everybody gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely saluted everybody,
-and had not a moment to ourselves for miles.
-
-“Over there,” said the skipper afterward, pointing vaguely to the
-southeast over the Schelde, “they ’re Roman Catholics. There ’s a
-lot of Spaniards left in Holland.” By Spaniards he meant Dutchmen with
-some Spanish blood.
-
-“Then they enjoy their Sundays?” I suggested.
-
-“Yes,” he answered sarcastically, “they enjoy their Sundays. They put
-their playing-cards in their pockets before they go to church, and then
-they go straight from the church to the café, and play high, and as like
-as not knife each other before they ’ve done.” Clearly it takes all
-sorts to make a little world like Holland, and it is difficult to strike
-the mean between absolute nullity and homicidal knives. My regret is
-that the yacht never got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing in
-cafés.
-
-On Monday morning every skipper on every river and canal of Holland
-tries to prove that the stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion.
-The East Schelde hummed with express barges at five A. M. It was exactly
-like a Dutch picture by an old master. Even we, in no hurry, with a
-strong tide under us and a rising northwester behind us, accomplished
-fifteen sea-miles in ninety minutes. Craft were taking shelter from the
-threatened gale. In spite of mistakes by an English crew unaccustomed
-to a heavy mainsail in tortuous navigation and obstreperous weather,
-we reached Dordrecht railway bridge without public shame; and then the
-skipper decided that our engine could not be trusted to push us through
-the narrow aperture against wind and tide. Hence we bargained with a
-tug, and were presently attached thereto, waiting for the bridge to
-open.
-
-Considering that Holland is a country where yachts are understood, and
-where swing-bridges open at a glance, we had to wait some little time
-for that bridge; namely, three hours. The patriotism of the skipper was
-strained. During the whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us
-wildly about like a kettle at the tail of a busy dog, and continuously
-collecting other kettles, so that our existence was one long shock and
-collision. But we saw a good deal of home life on the barges, from a
-minor barge which a girl will steer to the three-thousand-ton affair
-that surpasses mail steamers in capacity.
-
-[Illustration: 0045]
-
-There are two homes on these monsters, one at the stem and the other
-at the stern; the latter is frequently magnificent in spaciousness
-and gilding. That the two families in the two distant homes are ever
-intimate is impossible, that they are even acquainted is improbable;
-but they seem to share a tireless dog, who runs incessantly along the
-leagues of planking which separate them.
-
-The bridge did at last open, and everything on the river, unmindful of
-everything else, rushed headlong at the opening, like a crowd of sinners
-dashing for a suddenly unbarred door into heaven. Our tug jerked us into
-the throng, a fearful squeeze, and we were through. We cast off, the
-gulden were collected in a tin, and within five minutes we were moored
-in the New Haven, under the lee of the Groote Kerk, with trees all
-around us, in whose high tops a full gale was now blowing.
-
-The next morning our decks were thickly carpeted with green leaves,
-a singular sight. The harbor-master came aboard to demand dues, and
-demanded them in excellent English.
-
-“Where did you learn English?” I asked, and he answered with strange
-pride:
-
-“Sir, I served seven years under the British flag.”
-
-Standing heedless in the cockpit, under driving rain, he recounted
-the casualties of the night. Fifteen miles higher up the river a
-fifteen-hundred-ton barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consisting,
-_inter alia_, of all his family, were drowned. I inquired how such an
-event could happen in a narrow river amid a numerous population, and
-learned that in rough weather these barges anchor when a tug can do no
-more with them, and the crew go to bed and sleep. The water gradually
-washes in and washes in, until the barge is suddenly and silently
-engulfed. Dutch phlegm! Corresponding to their Sabbatic phlegm, no
-doubt. Said the harbor-master:
-
-“Yes, there is a load-line, but they never takes no notice of it in
-Holland; they just loads them up till they won’t hold any more.”
-
-The fatalism of the working-classes everywhere is perhaps the most
-utterly astounding of all human phenomena.
-
-Thoughtful, I went off to examine the carved choir-stalls in the Groote
-Kerk. These choir-stalls are among the most lovely sights in Holland.
-Their free, fantastic beauty is ravishing and unforgetable; they make
-you laugh with pleasure as you behold them. I doubt not that they
-were executed by a rough-tongued man, in a dirty apron, with shocking
-finger-nails.
-
-[Illustration: 0052]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III--DUTCH WORK
-
-We passed through Rotterdam more than once, without seeing more of
-it than the amazing traffic of its river and its admirable zoological
-gardens full of chromatically inclined parrots; but we stopped at a
-minor town close by, on a canal off the Meuse, Schiedam. Instinct
-must have guided me, for the sociological interest of Schiedam was not
-inconsiderable. Schiedam is called by the Dutch “stinking Schiedam.”
- I made a circuit of the town canals in the dinghy and convinced myself
-that the epithet was just and not malicious. On the lengthy quays were a
-large number of very dignified gin distilleries, whose architecture was
-respectable and sometimes even very good, dating from perhaps early
-in the last century. Each had a baptismal name, such as “Liverpool,”
- inscribed in large letters across its façade. This rendering decent and
-this glorification of gin constituted an impressive phenomenon. But
-it was the provinciality and the uncouth melancholy of the apparently
-prosperous town that took my fancy. We walked through all its principal
-streets in the rain, and I thought I had never seen a provinciality so
-exquisitely painful and perfect. In this city of near thirty thousand
-people there was not visible one agreeably imposing shop, or one woman
-attired with intent to charm, or one yard of smooth pavement. I know not
-why I find an acrid pleasure in thus beholding mediocrity, the average,
-the everyday ordinary, as it is; but I do. No museum of Amsterdam, The
-Hague, or Haarlem touched me so nearly as the town of Schiedam, which,
-after all, I suppose I must have liked.
-
-Toward six o’clock we noticed an unquiet, yet stodgy, gathering in the
-square where is the electric-tram terminus, then a few uniforms. I asked
-a superior police officer what there was. He said in careful, tranquil
-English:
-
-“There is nothing. But there is a strike of glass-workers in the town.
-Some of them don’t want to work, and some of them do want to work. Those
-that have worked to-day are being taken home in automobiles. That is
-all.”
-
-I was glad it was all, for from his manner I had expected him to
-continue to the effect that the glass-workers had been led away by paid
-agitators and had no good reason to strike. The automobiles began to
-come along, at intervals, at a tremendous pace, each with a policeman by
-the chauffeur’s side. In one was a single artisan, middle-aged, with a
-cigar in the corner of his mouth, and a certain adventurous look in his
-eye. The crowd grimly regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were
-there by accident, but obviously they lacked histrionic training.
-In short, the scene was one of the common objects of the wayside
-of existence all over the civilized world. It presented no novelty
-whatever, and yet to witness it in Holland was piquant, and caused one
-to think afresh and perhaps more clearly.
-
-At night, when it had ceased to rain. I was escorting a friend to the
-station. Musicians were climbing up into the bandstand in the same
-square. It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly municipal concert.
-The railway-station, far out, was superbly gloomy, and it was the only
-station in Holland where I failed to get a non-Dutch newspaper. The
-train, with the arrogance of an international express, slid in, slid
-out, and forgot Schiedam. I emerged from the station alone. A one-horse
-tram was waiting.
-
-The tram, empty, with a sinking, but everlasting, white horse under a
-yellow cloth, was without doubt the most provincial and melancholy thing
-that destiny has yet brought me in contact with. The simple spectacle
-of it, in the flickering gaslights and in the light of its own lamps,
-filled the heart, with an anguish inexplicable and beautiful. I got in.
-An age passed. Then an old workman got in, and saluted; I saluted. Save
-for the saluting, it was the Five Towns of the eighties over again,
-intensified, and the last tram out of Hanbridge before the theater-tram.
-
-An age passed. Then a mysterious figure drew the cloth off the horse,
-and the horse braced up all its four legs. We were starting when
-a tight-folded umbrella waved in the outer obscurity. An elderly,
-easy-circumstanced couple arrived upon us with deliberation; the
-umbrella was a good one.
-
-We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long curves of suburban
-desolation. Then a few miserable shops that ought to have been shut;
-then the square once more, now jammed in every part with a roaring,
-barbaric horde. In the distance, over a floor of heads, was an island of
-illumination, with the figures of puffing and blowing musicians in it;
-but no rumor of music could reach us through the din. The white horse
-trotted mildly into and right through the multitude, which jeered
-angrily, but fell back. An enormous multitude, Gothic, Visi-gothic,
-savage, uncivilized, chiefly consisting of young men and big boys--the
-weekly concert of humanizing music!
-
-[Illustration: 0057]
-
-I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty canal-side to
-the yacht. The impression of stagnation, tedium, provincialism was
-overwhelming. Nevertheless, here, as in other towns, we were struck by
-the number of shop-windows with artist’s materials for sale. Such was
-Schiedam. If it is asked whether I went to Holland on a yachting cruise
-to see this sort of thing, the answer is that I just did.
-
-After a few weeks I began to perceive that Schiedam and similar places,
-though thrilling, were not the whole of Holland, and perhaps not the
-most representative of Holland. As the yacht worked northward, Holland
-seemed to grow more Dutch, until, in the chain of shallow lakes and
-channels that hold Friesland in a sort of permanent baptism, we came
-to what was for me the ideal or celestial Holland--everything done by
-water, even grass cut under water, and black-and-white cows milked
-in the midst of ponds, and windmills over the eternal flatness used
-exclusively to shift inconvenient water from one level to another. The
-road is water in Friesland, and all the world is on the road. If your
-approach to a town is made perilous by a succession of barges that
-will obstinately keep the middle of the channel, you know that it is
-market-day in that town, and the farmers are rolling home in agreeable
-inebriation.
-
-The motor broke down in Friesland, and we were immobolized in the midst
-of blue-green fields, red dogs, the cows aforesaid, green milk-floats,
-blue-bloused sportsmen, and cargoes of cannon-ball cheese. We decided to
-tow the yacht until we got to a favorable reach. Certain barges sailed
-past us right into the eye of the wind, against all physical laws,
-but the _Velsa_ possessed not this magic. We saw three men comfortably
-towing a string of three huge barges, and we would tow. Unfortunately
-the only person, the skipper, who knew how to tow had to remain on
-board. The cook, the deck-hand, and I towed like Greeks pulling against
-Greeks, and could scarcely move one little yacht. The cook, neurasthenic
-by temperament, grew sad, until he fell into three feet of inundation,
-which adventure struck him as profoundly humorous, so that he was
-contorted with laughter. This did not advance the yacht. Slowly we
-learned that towing is not mere brute striving, but an art.
-
-We at last came to terms with a tug, as our desire was to sleep at
-Sneek. Sneek is the veritable metropolis of those regions. After
-passing, at late dusk, the mysterious night-watchers of eel-nets, who
-are wakened in their elaborate green-and-yellow boats by a bell, like
-a Paris concierge, we gradually emerged into nocturnal Sneek through
-a quadruple lane of barges and tugs so long as to put Sneek among the
-seven great ports of the world. And even in Sneek at nightfall the
-impression of immense quantities of water and of greenness, yellowness,
-and redness was continued. It rained, as usual, in Sneek the next day,
-but no rain and no water could damp Sneek. It was the most active
-town any of us had ever seen. It must have been the original “hive of
-industry.” It was full, and full of everything. The market was full of
-cattle, pigs, and sheep, crowded in pens and in carts; calves, prone,
-with all four legs tied together, filled acres of pavement. The cafés
-were full of dealers and drovers, mostly rather jolly, being served by
-slatternly, pleasant women. The streets were full of good shops, and
-of boys and girls following us and touching us to see if we existed.
-(Dreadful little boors!) The barges were full of cauliflowers, cabbages,
-apples, potatoes, sabots, cheeses, and barrels. The canals were full of
-barges and steamers.
-
-And immediately one sat down to sketch a group of craft one learned that
-nothing was stationary. Everything moved that floated--everything on
-the surface of miles of canal! Everybody, without haste, but without
-stopping ever, was tirelessly engaged in shifting matter from one spot
-to another. At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty,
-eighty tons, would set off for a neighboring village with a few
-passengers,--including nice girls,--a few cattle, and high piles of
-miscellaneous packages; or would come in from a neighboring village. The
-kaleidoscope was everlasting; but it did not fatigue, because it never
-hurried. Only it made us ashamed of our idleness. Gently occupied old
-country-women, with head-dresses of lace-work and a gold casque, the
-whole ridiculously surmounted by a black bonnet for fashion’s sake--even
-these old women made us ashamed of our untransporting idleness.
-
-[Illustration: 0063]
-
-Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a
-spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is
-memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand
-inhabitants!
-
-As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden,
-a new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who
-had been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich,
-spoke thus:
-
-“Is this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and
-live at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes,
-and they ‘re so calm.”
-
-I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in
-Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said:
-
-“Well, they ‘re all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as
-much in another way. Sneek is the mean.”
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV--THE ZUYDER ZEE
-
-WE reached the Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a
-respectably picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken,
-the alleged jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs
-and the costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New
-York for the instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the
-mainland, a long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said
-that Marken was a side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native
-country. So I decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner
-of the only foreign yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without
-visiting Marken. My real reason was undoubtedly that the day’s program
-had been upset by undue lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam.
-Thus we sailed due north for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken
-there might be something lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed.
-
-The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you don’t mind
-rain, and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet.
-It has the appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom
-with our sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged
-field. The skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under
-ice, and how he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren,
-risking his life for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the
-next day, with more fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because
-there was no other way home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled
-and immense pond, with a bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of
-diminished trees and houses sticking up out of its horizons here and
-there. When these low silhouettes happen to denote your destination,
-they have the strange faculty of receding from your prow just as fast as
-you sail toward them, a magic sea of an exquisite monotony; and when you
-arrive anywhere, you are so surprised at having overtaken the silhouette
-that your arrival is a dream, in the unreal image of a city.
-
-The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.
-
-We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never
-saw one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye--beautiful domestic
-architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful
-water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals.
-If it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be
-inhabited exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did
-eight sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break
-at billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No
-other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses
-per head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue
-blouses throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story
-of a brown and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man
-was in the second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They
-were flinging cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we
-left, and they never dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung
-into the mysterious night, when the great forms of little cargo-steamers
-floated soundless over romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long,
-white English steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its
-flulfy chambermaid, and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its
-myriad lights and gleams, glided to a berth by the water-tower, and
-hung there like a cloud beyond the town, keeping me awake half the night
-while I proved to myself that I did not really envy its owner and that
-the Velsa was really a much better yacht.
-
-[Illustraion: 0070]
-
-The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the
-English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who
-spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was
-selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British
-army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the
-Dutch army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh,
-British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand
-the phrase “East Indian cigar.” He said there were no such cigars in
-his parents’ shop. When I said “Sumatra,” he understood, and fetched
-his mother. When I said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn,
-his mother put away all the samples already exhibited and fetched his
-father. The family had begun to comprehend that a serious customer had
-strayed into the shop. The father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity
-and deference went up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of
-cigars that were warm to the touch. “These are the best?”
-
-“These are the best.” I bought. They were threepence apiece.
-
-A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling
-sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the
-Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have
-atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have
-adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for
-the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like
-too many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of
-dogs--dogs that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order
-to prove that they are of the race that has always ended by expelling
-invaders with bloodshed.
-
-I was safer in the yacht’s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though
-the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched,
-three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into
-the canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone
-on the quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as
-table-tops--cleaner.
-
-The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though
-Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived
-there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first
-glance, exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I
-remember it as the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner
-steering, and foul the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his
-owner, as if to say, “You see what owners do when they take charge.” I
-admitted it.
-
-We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy
-and recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having
-taken to his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail
-in a jiffy. The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become
-an omnibus conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus
-conductor will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young
-man, and himself painted in water-colors.
-
-[Illustration: 0076]
-
-I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town;
-but I know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely
-practical town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the
-cook. We were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised
-even by E. V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation.
-Kampen has architecture,--wonderful gates,--but it also has the crudest
-pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east
-wind was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner
-of Kampen was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen,
-which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning
-was warm and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven
-weeks continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three
-hours we were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was
-steering.
-
-“Please keep the center of the channel,” the skipper enjoined me.
-
-I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are
-privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within
-half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on
-to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had
-seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is
-the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at
-high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs
-and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go
-to Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the
-town.
-
-Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end
-surcease, and all their long-colored _weins_ (vanes) streamed in the
-wind against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was
-the spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses
-that pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue
-ensign), and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay
-and held him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the
-spectacle of his aged father’s trading barge, unexpectedly making for
-the same port, with his mother, brother, and sister on deck--the crew!
-Arrived in port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the
-skipper boarded his old home with becoming placidity.
-
-The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful
-forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom
-nated by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a
-smack arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed
-to be always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect
-picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an
-establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass.
-The town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick
-water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an
-avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched
-off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a
-square. Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in
-Indian reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely
-imitated from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the
-church was a picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a
-sacristan out of a late novel by Huysmans.
-
-The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.
-
-The women’s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being
-more visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all
-skirts blue. Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud,
-commanding, fit adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the
-grand manner. Their salutes were sometimes royal.
-
-The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange
-warmth; the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to
-have been constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants,
-especially the visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return
-of their mariners; the urbanity of everybody--all these things helped
-to produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old,
-unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.
-
-All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the
-canal. The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with
-disastrous effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In
-a gloomy and spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo
-wall-clocks, and bought a few little things. As we finally boarded the
-yacht in the dark, we could see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor
-bending over a table on which was a lamp that harshly lighted their
-grave faces. They may have thought that they were calculating and
-apportioning the week’s profits; but in reality they were playing at
-masterpieces by Rembrandt.
-
-[Illustration: 0081]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V--SOME TOWNS
-
-HAARLEM is the capital of a province, and has the airs of a minor
-metropolis. When we moored in the Donkere Spaarne, all the architecture
-seemed to be saying to us, with innocent pride, that this was the city
-of the illustrious Frans Hals, and the only place where Frans Hals could
-be truly appreciated. Haarlem did not stare at strangers, as did other
-towns. The shops in the narrow, busy Saturday-night streets were small
-and slow, and it took us most of an evening, in and out of the heavy
-rain, to buy three shawls, two pairs of white stockings, and some
-cigarettes; but the shopmen and shop-women, despite their ignorance of
-English, American, and French, showed no openmouthed provinciality at
-our fantastic demands. The impression upon us of the mysterious entity
-of the town was favorable; we felt at home.
-
-The yacht was just opposite the habitation of a nice middle-class
-family, and on Sunday morning, through the heavy rain, I could see a boy
-of sixteen, a girl of fourteen, and a child of five or six, all dressing
-slowly together in a bedroom that overlooked us, while the father in
-shirt-sleeves constantly popped to and fro. They were calmly content
-to see and be seen. Presently father and son, still in shirt-sleeves,
-appeared on the stoop, each smoking a cigar, and the girl above, arrayed
-in Sunday white, moved about setting the bedroom in order. It was a
-pleasant average sight, enhanced by the good architecture of the house,
-and by a certain metropolitan self-unconsciousness.
-
-We went to church later, or rather into a church, and saw beautiful
-models of ships hung in the nave, and aged men entering, with their
-hats on and good cigars in their mouths. For the rest, they resembled
-superintendents of English Sunday-schools or sidesmen of small parishes.
-In another church we saw a Sunday-school in full session, a parson in
-a high pulpit exhorting, secretary and minor officials beneath him, and
-all the boys standing up with shut eyes and all the girls sitting down
-with shut eyes. We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protestant
-country in Europe.
-
-In the afternoon, when the rain-clouds lifted for a few moments and the
-museums were closed, we viewed the residential prosperity of Haarlem, of
-which the chief seat is the Nieuwe Gracht, a broad canal, forbidden to
-barges, flanked by broad quays beautifully paved in small red brick, and
-magnificent houses. A feature of the noble architecture here was that
-the light ornamentation round the front doors was carried up and round
-the central windows of the first and second stories. A grand street! One
-properly expected to see elegant women at the windows of these lovely
-houses,--some were almost palaces,--and one was disappointed. Women
-there were, for at nearly every splendid window, the family was seated,
-reading, talking, gazing, or drinking tea; but all the women were dowdy;
-the majority were middle-aged; none was beautiful or elegant. Nor was
-any of the visible furniture distinguished.
-
-The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to architecture, pavements,
-and the moral comeliness of being neat and clean. The esthetic
-sense apparently stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem with
-suspicion, as a quality dangerous and unrespectable. As daylight failed,
-the groups within gathered closer and closer to the windows, to catch
-the last yellow drops of it, and their curiosity about the phenomena of
-the streets grew more frank. We were examined. In return we examined.
-And a discussion arose as to whether inspection from within justified
-inquisitiveness from the street. The decision was that it did not; that
-a person inside a house had the right to quiz without being quizzed. But
-this merely academic verdict was not allowed to influence our immediate
-deportment. In many houses of the lesser streets tables were already
-laid for supper, and one noticed heavy silver napkin-rings and other
-silver. In one house the shadowy figures of a family were already
-grouped round a repast, and beyond them, through another white-curtained
-window at the back of the spacious room, could be discerned a dim
-courtyard full of green and yellow foliage. This agreeable picture,
-typifying all the domestic tranquillity and dignity of prosperous
-Holland, was the last thing we saw before the dark and the rain fell,
-and the gas-lamps flickered in.
-
-[Illustration: 0087]
-
-We entered The Hague through canals pitted by heavy rain, the banks of
-which showed many suburban residences, undistinguished, but set in the
-midst of good gardens. And because it was the holiday week,--the week
-containing the queen’s birthday,--and we desired quietude, we obtained
-permission to lie at the private quay of the gasworks. The creators
-of The Hague gas-works have made only one mistake: they ought to have
-accomplished their act much earlier, so that Balzac might have described
-it; for example, in “The Alkahest,” which has the best imaginative
-descriptions of Dutch life yet written. The Hague gas-works are like
-a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this vast,
-clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is scrupulously
-in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the city and
-see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes, when
-at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay
-was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real
-workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising
-at five-thirty a.m. out of mere joyous ecstasy.
-
-Nor did the bargemen who day and night ceaselessly and silently
-propelled their barges past us into the city by means of poles and
-sweat, seem to be toying with existence. The procession of these barges
-never stopped. On the queen’s birthday, when our ship was dressed, and
-the whole town was flagged, it went on, just as the decorated trams and
-tram-drivers went on. Some of the barges penetrated right through
-the populous districts, and emerged into the oligarchic quarter of
-ministries, bureaus, official residences, palaces, parks, art dealers,
-and shops of expensive lingerie--the quarter, as in every capital, where
-the precious traditions of correctness, patriotism, red-tape, order,
-luxury, and the moral grandeur of devising rules for the nice conduct of
-others are carefully conserved and nourished. This quarter was very well
-done, and the bargemen, with their perspiring industry, might have had
-the good taste to keep out of it.
-
-The business center of The Hague, lying between the palaces and the
-gas-works, is cramped, crowded, and unimpressive. The cafés do not
-glitter, and everybody knows that the illumination of cafés in a capital
-is a sure index of a nation’s true greatness. Many small cafés, veiled
-in costly curtains at window and door, showed stray dazzling shafts of
-bright light, but whether the true greatness of Holland was hidden
-in these seductive arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week the
-principal cafés were emptying soon after ten o’clock. On the other hand,
-the large stores were still open at that hour, and the shop-girls, whose
-pale faces made an admirable contrast to their black robes, were still
-serving ladies therein. At intervals, in the afternoons, one saw a chic
-woman, moving with a consciousness of her own elegance; but she was
-very exceptional. The rest might have run over for the day from Haarlem,
-Delft, Utrecht, or Leyden. In the really excellent and well-frequented
-music-halls there was no elegance either. I have never anywhere seen
-better music-hall entertainments than in Holland. In certain major
-capitals of Europe and elsewhere the public is apt to prove its own
-essential naïveté by allowing itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous
-music-halls. The Dutch are more astute, if less elegant.
-
-The dying engine of the yacht lost consciousness, for about the
-twentieth time during this trip, as we were nearing Amsterdam; but a
-high wind, carrying with it tremendous showers of rain, kindly blew us,
-under bare poles, up the last half-mile of the North Sea Canal into the
-private haven of the Royal Dutch Yacht-Club, where we were most amicably
-received, as, indeed, in all the yacht-club basins of Holland. Baths,
-telephones, and smoking-rooms were at our disposal without any charge,
-in addition to the security of the haven, and it was possible to get
-taxicabs from the somewhat distant city. We demanded a chauffeur who
-could speak English. They sent us a taxi with two chauffeurs neither of
-whom could speak any language whatsoever known to philologists. But
-by the use of maps and a modification of the pictorial writing of the
-ancient Aztecs, we contrived to be driven almost where we wanted. At
-the end of the excursion I had made, in my quality of observer, two
-generalizations: first, that Amsterdam taxis had two drivers for
-safety; and, second, that taxi-travel in Amsterdam was very exciting and
-dangerous. But our drivers were so amiable, soft-tongued, and energetic
-that I tipped them both. I then, somehow, learned the truth: one of the
-men was driving a taxi for the first time, and the other was teaching
-him.
-
-[Illustration: 0094]
-
-After driving and walking about Amsterdam for several days, I decided
-that it would be completely civilized when it was repaved, and not
-before. It is the paradise of stomachs and the hell of feet. Happily,
-owing to its canals and its pavements, it has rather fewer of the rash
-cyclists who menace life in other Dutch cities. In Holland, outside
-Amsterdam, everybody uses a cycle. If you are ran down, as you are, it
-is just as likely to be by an aged and toothless female peasant as by
-an office boy. Also there are fewer homicidal dogs in Amsterdam than
-elsewhere, and there is the same general absence of public monuments
-which makes other Dutch cities so agreeably strange to the English and
-American traveler. You can scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue
-of a nonentity in Holland, because there are scarcely any statues.
-
-Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland.
-Its architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively
-immanent in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of
-it in the mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless,
-the inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer.
-Amsterdam has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever
-passed through the head of a stock-broker. It is excessively ugly and
-graceless, but I admire it for being a caprice, and especially for being
-a stock-broker’s caprice. No English stock-broker would have a caprice.
-Amsterdam has small and dear restaurants of the first order, where a few
-people with more money than appetite can do themselves very well indeed
-in hushed privacy. It also has prodigious cafés. Krasnopolshy’s--a town,
-not a café--is said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It
-isn’t; but it is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a
-million people.
-
-[Illustration: 0099]
-
-In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the
-quality which above all others a great city ought to possess. It
-pullulates. Vast masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and
-boil over into its public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the
-rain, is thronged with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of
-its shops. The Kalver-Straat will compete handsomely with Bond Street.
-Go along the length of it, and you will come out of it thoughtful. Make
-your way thence to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and
-you will have to conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all
-its habitations empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and
-lofty and golden, are crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and
-dominated by rhapsodic orchestras of women in white who do what they
-can against the hum of ten thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of
-waiters, and the clatter of crockery. It is a pandemonium with a certain
-stolidity. The excellent music-halls and circuses are equally crowded,
-and curiously, so are the suburban resorts on the rim of the city. Among
-the larger places, perhaps, the Café Américain, on the Leidsche-Plein,
-was the least feverish, and this was not to be counted in its favor,
-because the visitor to a city which pullulates is, and should he,
-happiest in pullulating. The crowd, the din, the elbowing, the glitter
-for me, in a town like Amsterdam! In a town like Gouda, which none
-should fail to visit for the incomparable stained-glass in its church, I
-am content to be as placid and solitary as anybody, and I will follow
-a dancing bear and a Gipsy girl up and down the streets thereof with
-as much simplicity as anybody. But Amsterdam is the great, vulgar,
-inspiring world.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI--MUSEUMS
-
-I DID not go yachting in Holland in order to visit museums;
-nevertheless, I saw a few. When it is possible to step off a yacht clean
-into a museum, and heavy rain is falling, the temptation to remain on
-board is not sufficiently powerful to keep you out of the museum. At
-Dordrecht there is a municipal museum manned by four officials.
-They received us with hope, with enthusiasm, with the most touching
-gratitude. Their interest in us was pathetic. They were all dying of
-ennui in those large rooms, where the infection hung in clouds almost
-visible, and we were a specific stimulant. They seized on us as the
-morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of the drug.
-
-[Illustration: 0106]
-
-Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of
-Ary Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not
-of heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer
-is one of its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to
-be another.) And posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The
-Dordrecht museum is waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that
-comes, the museum will be burned down, or turned into a brewery, and
-the officials will be delivered from their dreadful daily martyrdom of
-feigning ecstatic admiration for Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it
-possible to comprehend the full baseness, the exquisite unimportance,
-of Scheffer’s talent. The best thing of his in a museum full of him is
-a free, brilliant copy of a head by Rembrandt done at the age of eleven.
-It was, I imagine, his last tolerable work. His worst pictures, solemnly
-hung here, would be justifiably laughed at in a girls’ schoolroom. But
-his sentimentality, conventionality, and ugliness arouse less laughter
-than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures have come into the Dordrecht
-museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and Bosboom are refreshing,
-but even their strong influence cannot disinfect the place nor keep
-the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of time, and saw no
-other visitors.
-
-Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and
-esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop,
-buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a
-high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and
-here I got it. The establishment might have survived from the age
-when Dordrecht was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so
-survived. It was full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use.
-It had an architectural air, and was aware of its own dignity. The
-head-salesman managed to convey to me that the best tea--that was,
-tea that a connoisseur would call _tea_--cost two and a half florins a
-pound. I conveyed to him that I would take two pounds of the same. The
-head-salesman then displayed to me the tea in its japanned receptacle.
-He next stood upright and expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely
-white apron, silently appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of
-the shop, and with solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for
-his superior to pour tea into. Having performed his share in the rite,
-he disappeared. The parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process
-being evidently a matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden
-note. Whereon the merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter
-from his office, and offered the change with punctilio. He would have
-been perfect, but for a hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I
-regretted this hole. We left the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit
-that Dordrecht had atoned to us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have
-made an excellent tea-dealer.
-
-The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art
-which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum
-which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only
-one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was
-a cause of joy--that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the
-most wonderful thing in the tourist’s Holland is the fact that the small
-museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You
-enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a
-bell, and the _locus_ is antipathetic; but one’s pulse is immediately
-quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And
-Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre
-paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally
-the guide-books say naught.
-
-The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up
-with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant,
-who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired
-the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum
-of the kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by
-Rembrandt, of which he managed to exaggerate the value.
-
-Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces
-than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one’s first sight of Rembrandt’s
-“Lesson in Anatomy” therein would constitute a dramatic event in any
-yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy
-one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday
-of the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared
-coarsely around, and understood nothing--nothing. True, they gazed in a
-hypnotized semicircle at “The Lesson in Anatomy,” and I can hear amiable
-persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant
-and the simple. I don’t believe it. I believe that if “The Lesson
-in Anatomy” had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of
-Carolus-Duran, the ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized
-just the same. And I have known the ignorant and the simple to be
-overwhelmed with emotion by spurious trickery of the most absurd and
-offensive kind.
-
-An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic
-experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic
-sense the majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be
-artistically civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can
-make any appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy
-of art, by which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in
-the midst of a vast, dangerous population--a few adventurous whites
-among indigenous hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may
-have splendid qualities, but they have not that one quality which
-more than any other vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the
-manifestations of art which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not
-very agreeable either. A string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth,
-came into the Mauritshuis out of the rain, and mildly and politely
-scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable. They were not intimidated.
-Well, I like that. I preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten
-thousand tourists.
-
-Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag
-was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste,
-as illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact
-that many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two
-superb works--a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau--could not make up for
-the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full
-of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having
-time to spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is
-famous, and is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea,
-but it does not rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a
-sky full of kites. Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left
-Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was profoundly established within me,
-and in that there is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it
-becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.
-
-[Illustration: 0112]
-
-The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town
-of fine architecture, is that they should both--the Ryks and the
-municipal--be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the
-age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs,
-and the result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities.
-Michelangelo often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects
-and artists more skilled than he in pleasing city councils and
-building-committees muddled away opportunities which he would have
-glorified; but he did obtain part of a job now and then, subject to it
-being “improved” by some duffer like Bernini, who of course contrived to
-leave a large fortune, whereas if Michelangelo had lived to-day he might
-never have got any job at all.
-
-Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the
-Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, “The Night-Watch”
- of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on
-the part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you:
-“Hats off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.”
- The truth is that “The Night-Watch” is neither very lovable nor very
-beautiful. It is an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering
-centuries in the eye, and it does so. But how long it will continue to
-do so is a nice question.
-
-Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of
-room, despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me
-with youth. It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful
-mistakes, but at any rate it is being made under the guidance of
-somebody who is not afraid of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced
-with such a collection, one realizes the shortcomings of London museums
-and the horror of that steely English official conservatism, at once
-timid and ruthless, which will never permit itself to discover a foreign
-artist until the rest of the world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks
-there are Van Goghs and Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best,
-but they are there. Also there are some of the most superb water-colors
-of the age, and good things by a dozen classic moderns who are still
-totally unrepresented in London. I looked at a celestial picture of
-women--the kind of thing that Guys would have done if he could--painted
-perhaps fifty years ago, and as modern as the latest Sargent
-water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T. C.? T. C.? Who on earth could
-T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas Couture, of course! A great
-artist! He will appear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about
-the middle of the twenty-first century.
-
-Then there was Daumier’s “Christ and His Disciples,” a picture that I
-would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might
-seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take
-the subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to
-make you think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did
-this. It is true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has
-seen it and understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of
-the exalted, mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive
-disciples in the gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the
-yacht and its ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that
-art still lives. And I thought of Wilson Steer’s “The Music-Room” in
-the Tate Gallery, London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in
-London also art still lives.
-
-[Illustration: 0117]
-
-
-
-
-PART II--THE BALTIC
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII--THE YACHT I LOST
-
-OUR adventures toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I
-put into the planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a
-month of time at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts
-thinks nothing of a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere
-preliminaries. Hence, with admirable forethought, I determined to send
-the yacht on in advance. The _Velsa_ was to cross from her home port,
-Brightlingsea, to the Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands,
-to creep along the coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark,
-past the mouths of the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg,
-where we were to join her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then
-to mount still farther the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by
-a route combining fjords and canals, cross the top of the Jutland
-peninsula, and enter the desired Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal
-way would have been through the Kiel Canal. Yachts never take the Liim
-Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason for taking the Liim Fjord.
-Moreover, English yachts have a habit of getting into trouble with
-the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English yachtsmen are apt to
-languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I was uncertain
-about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and I did not
-wish to acquire certitude.
-
-So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large
-allowance of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful
-new 30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him
-except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind
-never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never
-blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before
-the yacht’s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a
-week the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from
-Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind
-held in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship
-had reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my
-Dutch skipper’s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east
-wind still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by
-cable. Then he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the
-mail-steamer at Harwich for Esbjerg.
-
-[Illustration: 0123]
-
-She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her
-very first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced
-Danes, who had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom
-they chattered in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and
-incomprehensible. Also she was full of original Danish food, and
-especially of marvelous and mysterious sandwiches, which, with small
-quantities of champagne, we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably
-imitated from Atlantic liners. Despite the east wind, which still held,
-that steamer reached Esbjerg in the twinkling of an eye.
-
-When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in
-the dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an
-unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it
-as great ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant.
-There was a vast fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid
-imperceptibly past the mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the
-multitudinous masts for the mast of the _Velsa_. Her long Dutch streamer
-was ever unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What
-the mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have
-done in more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the
-distance was simply nothing.
-
-I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes,
-though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on
-the quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound
-to be on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great
-ship, because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have
-accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The _Velsa_ was
-definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of
-the Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled
-us out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of
-purgatory. He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he
-consented to be our friend, no serious harm could happen to our
-universe. And the hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the
-cigars were excellent. And the three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting
-demurely about the long corridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad
-in prints, foreign, separated romantically from us by the palisades of
-language--the three modest chambermaids were all young and beautiful,
-with astounding complexions.
-
-The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than
-east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless,
-I more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the
-extreme end of the jetty--about a mile each way each time--in the hope
-of descrying the _Velsa’s_ long, red streamer in the offing. It was
-Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly
-modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though
-extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of
-the same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger,
-especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful
-or even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong,
-gusty breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.
-
-We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we
-not gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the
-standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other
-place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday
-summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a
-degree really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at
-all they wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been
-a southern zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but
-we retained them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound
-compensations. There were two types of beautiful women, one with
-straight lips, and the other with the upper lip like the traditional
-bow. The latter, of course, was the more generously formed, acquiescent
-and yet pouting, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had the effect
-of making the foreigner feel that to be a foreigner and a stranger in
-Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all the daily frequentations and intimacies
-of the social organism, was a mistake.
-
-[Illustration: 0130]
-
-In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the
-peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed
-throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of
-creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as
-we stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as
-it seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic
-watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic,
-whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a
-heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.
-
-We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed
-about ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly
-thatched, and each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures.
-These farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change,
-probably for the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about
-thirty or forty years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in
-two-horse vehicles, and though certain old men strolled to and fro,
-smoking magnificent pipes at least a foot and a half long, the weight
-of which had to be supported with the hand, there was little evidence of
-opulence or even of ease.
-
-The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and
-other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even
-leap across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously,
-showed much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every
-farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to
-attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these
-torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which
-somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. Scores
-of dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a
-wise dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and
-learned the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves
-with the flat Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray
-purple; and as we approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles,
-we felt that we knew Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail
-to be waiting for us in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to
-other shores. But the yacht had not come.
-
-Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It
-is true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never
-been heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed
-us, fed us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us.
-We called him “Ober,” a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few
-years, and his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself
-in four languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all
-our requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, “Oh, yes!
-oh, yes!” He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one
-ancient town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was
-a young girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold
-post-cards with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a
-dealer. He sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows
-straight from Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by
-fragile women who saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a
-canopy of flags that stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He
-provided us with water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that
-we could descend to the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered
-from the wind by a pile of fish-boxes and from the showers by an
-umbrella, produce wet water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in
-motion.
-
-Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was
-lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or,
-rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober
-continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry.
-And then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island
-of Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible
-island! What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew
-it not. Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We
-found it at last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And
-I had been walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the
-_Velsa’s wein!_
-
-[Illustration: 0136]
-
-The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the
-Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The
-Ober said:
-
-“Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.”
-
-“Yes; but the German customs?”
-
-“Everything shall be arranged,” said the Ober.
-
-I said:
-
-“I don’t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.”
-
-The Ober said calmly:
-
-“I will go with you.”
-
-“All the way?”
-
-“I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak
-German very well. Nothing will go wrong.”
-
-Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put
-on his best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly
-through the German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first
-meal at a small German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed
-and accepted. When the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a
-good meal. He took us through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes
-of Schleswig-Holstein. He escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured
-rooms for us at the hotel. Then he said he must return. No! no! We could
-not let him abandon us in the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious
-provincial town. But he murmured that he must depart. The yacht might
-not arrive for days yet. I shuddered.
-
-“At any rate,” I said, “before you leave, inquire where the haven is,
-and take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.”
-
-He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in
-it. Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style
-of the _Velsa_.
-
-“There,” I said, “my yacht has a mast rather like that.”
-
-I looked again. Utterly impossible that the _Velsa_ could have arrived
-so quickly; but it was the _Velsa_. Joy! Almost tears of joy! I led the
-Ober on board. He said solemnly:
-
-“It is very beautiful.”
-
-So it was.
-
-But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.
-
-The Ober said:
-
-“I will arrange everything.”
-
-In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel
-hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall
-I look on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a
-featureless stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to
-its junction with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers.
-But no matter the dullness; we were afloat and in motion.
-
-We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from
-it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had
-several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland’s
-bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for
-having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said
-custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the
-regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the
-canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the
-skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were
-confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor
-would call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our
-papers, and let us go, thus supporting the skipper’s hotly held theory
-that by the law of nations yachts on rivers are free.
-
-We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice,
-companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the
-canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. “Only they don’t,”
- he added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly
-indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and
-ever, and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He
-said that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the
-same ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!
-
-We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy
-rain and the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the
-comparative freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which
-looked attractive on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us;
-it made us feel like spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little
-pleasure town. Even here we had not walked a mile on land before we
-were involved in forts and menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The
-whole fjord was covered with battle-ships, destroyers, submarines,
-Hydro-aëroplanes curved in the atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off
-the waves. The air was noisy with the whizzing of varied screws. It was
-enormous, terrific, intimidating, especially when at dusk
-search-lights began to dart among the lights of the innumerable
-fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply involved in
-the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew proudly,
-unchallenged.
-
-[Illustration: 0141]
-
-The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men
-here and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls
-left us utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content
-to sit vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain,
-discharging into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense.
-These quiet, tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw
-slavish material of the magnificent imperial system, and entirely
-unconnected with the wondrous brains that organized it and kept it
-going. The next morning we departed very early, but huge targets were
-being towed out in advance of us, and we effected our final escape into
-the free Baltic only by braving a fleet of battleships that fired into
-the checkered sky. Sometimes their shells glinted high up in the sun,
-and seemed to be curving along the top edge of an imaginary rainbow.
-We slowly left them astern, with, as I say, a certain relief. Little,
-unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VIII--BALTIC COMMUNITIES
-
-AT Vordingborg, a small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the
-largest and easternmost of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to
-be really for the first time in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had
-a certain international quality). We had sailed through the Langelands
-Belt, skirting the monotonous agricultural coasts of all sorts of
-islands, great and small, until one evening we reached this city, which
-looked imposing on the map. When we had followed the skipper ashore on
-his marketing expedition, and trodden all the stony streets of little
-Vordingborg, we seemed to know what essential Denmark, dozing in the
-midst of the Baltic, truly was.
-
-Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis
-to this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of
-tradition. It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises
-were placidly shopping therein--the same little bourgeoises that one
-sees all over the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists;
-a bookseller who also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl
-actuating an efficient sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an
-electric fan whirring close to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a
-vague open space, a few carts, with their shafts on the ground; a few
-stalls; a few women; a butcher whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses
-on a stand; baskets of fruit and vegetables on the Danish ground; our
-skipper chattering by signs and monosyllables in the middle. That was
-Vordingborg.
-
-[Illustration: 0146]
-
-In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more
-architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though
-it was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last
-service were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and
-screen were ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth
-at a fair. Three women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the
-interior. Their cloaks and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor.
-They never even glanced at us. We left the church, and then skirting
-market-gardens and climbing over the ramparts of the fort, we descended
-to the mournful little railway station, and as we watched a little train
-amble plaintively in and out of that terminus, we thought of the numbers
-of the hymns sung at the last service in the church, and the immense
-devastating ennui of provincial existence in remote places enveloped us
-like a dank fog. We set sail, and quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we
-might harden our hearts and be unjust to Vordingborg, which, after all,
-at bottom, must be very like a million other townlets on earth.
-
-Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis
-and a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the
-Stege Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter
-in a village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing--nothing but
-a thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked
-railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the
-railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo,
-and it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at
-anchor in the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving
-us alone in Faxo.
-
-At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy
-fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not
-even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was
-a telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning
-motionless on her father’s, or her grandfather’s, tarpaulin shoulder.
-Full of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled
-from Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole
-of a bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the
-capital of the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.
-
-[Illustration: 0151]
-
-And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the _Velsa_ had
-less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in
-such ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain
-a “story” about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was
-almost equal to being anchored off the Battery, New York.
-
-At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows
-of the booksellers’ shops were photographs of the director of the
-municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly
-resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself
-was among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a
-strange, comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the
-streets of Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of
-its taxicabs was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the
-Royal, with first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter
-garden, where the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and
-succeeded in amusing themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a
-politeness that could not possibly be achieved in any provincial town in
-England, were it five times the size of Aarhus. And why?
-
-Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance.
-Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a
-civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg
-stood unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered
-together in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had
-had the sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of
-fashion, but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They
-were neither one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness,
-efficiency, constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not
-capture the stranger’s interest.
-
-There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than
-Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its
-close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and
-by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the
-town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station
-and the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale
-costumes, and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a
-foreign country two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of
-Helsingôr have an architectural interest, and its fruit shops display
-exotic fruits at high prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles.
-Generals get out of a closed cab at the railway station, and they bear
-a furled standard, and vanish importantly with it into the arcana of the
-station. The newspapers of many countries are for sale at the kiosk. The
-harbor-master is a great man, and a suave.
-
-The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town
-and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often
-well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic
-proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of
-course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts,
-we saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in
-fatigue uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the
-table another private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand,
-doing nothing whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed
-bareness of the chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the
-monstrous melancholy of barrack-life, the same throughout the world.
-Part of the castle is set aside as a museum, wherein, under the
-direction of a guide, one is permitted to see a collection of pictures
-the surpassing ugliness of which nearly renders them interesting. The
-guide points through a window in the wall ten feet thick to a little
-plot of turf. “Where Hamlet walked.” No historical authority is offered
-to the visitor for this statement. The guide then leads one through a
-series of large rooms, empty save for an occasional arm-chair, to the
-true heart of the Kronborg, where he displayed to us a seated statue
-of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme unpleasant bluish-white. An
-inscription told that it had been presented to Kronborg by a committee
-of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some anniversary. The guide
-said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not believe him.
-
-[Illustration: 0157]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IX--A day’s SAIL
-
-ALTHOUGH there is a lively pleasure in discovering even the dullest and
-smallest towns and villages, the finest experience offered by the Baltic
-is the savor of the Baltic itself in a long day’s sail. I mean a day of
-fourteen hours at least, from six in the morning till eight at night,
-through varied seascapes and landscapes and varied weather. As soon as
-the yacht leaves harbor in the bracing chill of sunrise she becomes a
-distinct entity, independent, self-reliant. The half-dozen men on her,
-cut off from the world, are closely knitted into a new companionship,
-the sense of which is expressed not in words, but by the subtleties
-of tone and mien; and if only one amoung them falls short of absolute
-loyalty and good-will toward the rest, the republic is a failure, and
-the air of ocean poisoned. The dictum of an older and far more practised
-yachtsman than myself used always to be, “I ’ll have no man aboard my
-ship who can’t smile all the time.” It is a good saying. And it could
-be applied to my yacht in the Baltic. We had days at sea in the Baltic
-which were ideal and thrilling from one end to the other.
-
-[Illustration: 0161]
-
-To make a final study of the chart in the cabin while waiting for
-breakfast is a thrilling act. You choose a name on the chart, and
-decide: “We will go to that name.” It is a name. It is not yet a town
-or a village. It is just what you imagine it to be until you first sight
-it, when it instantly falsifies every fancy. The course is settled. The
-ship is on that course. The landmarks will suffice for an hour or two,
-but the sea-marks must be deciphered on the chart, which is an English
-chart, and hence inferior in fullness and clearness to either French
-or Dutch charts. Strange, this, for a nation preëminently maritime! To
-compensate, the English “Sailing Directions”--for example, the “Pilot’s
-Guide to the Baltic”--are so admirably written that it is a pleasure
-to read them. Lucid, succinct, elegant, they might serve as models to a
-novelist. And they are anonymous.
-
-To pick up the first buoy is thrilling. We are all equally ignorant of
-these waters; the skipper himself has not previously sailed them, and
-we are all, save the cook, engulfed below amid swaying saucepans, on the
-lookout for that buoy. It ought to be visible at a certain hour, but it
-is not. The skipper points with his hand and says the buoy must be about
-there, but it is not. He looks through my glasses, and I look through
-his; no result. Then the deck-hand, without glasses, cries grinning
-that he has located her. After a quarter of an hour I can see the thing
-myself. That a buoy? It is naught but a pole with a slightly swollen
-head. Absurd to call it a buoy! Nevertheless, we are relieved, and in
-a superior manner we reconcile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy
-of employing broom-handles for buoys. The reason for this dangerous
-idiosyncrasy neither the skipper nor anybody else could divine.
-Presently we have the broom close abeam, a bobbing stick all alone in
-the immense wilderness of water. There it is on the chart, and there it
-is in the water, a romantic miracle. We assuage its solitude for a few
-minutes, and then abandon it to loneliness.
-
-We resume the study of the chart; for although we are quite sure of our
-course, the skipper can never be sure enough. My attention is drawn to
-a foot-note that explains the ice-signals of the Baltic. And the skipper
-sets to telling tales of terror about the ice, in the Zuyder Zee and
-other seas. He tells how the ice forms under the ship surreptitiously,
-coming up from the bottom like treacle. You say, “It’s freezing
-to-night,” and the next morning the ship can’t move; and you may die of
-starvation, for though the ice will hold the ship, it won’t hold you.
-The skipper knew men who could remember ice in the Zuyder Zee in June.
-He himself had once oscillated for a whole week between two ports on the
-Zuyder Zee, visible to each other, pushed hither and thither by the ice,
-and unable to get anywhere at all. But ice was less terrible than
-it used to he, owing to the increased strength and efficiency of
-ice-breakers. And climate was less rigorous. Thus the skipper would
-reassure us for a moment, only to intimidate us afresh. For it seems
-that the ice has a way of climbing; it will climb up over everything,
-and inclose a ship. Indeed, he was most impressive on the subject of
-ice. He said that the twin horrors of the sea were ice and fog. But
-of fog he told no tales, being occupied with the forward valve of the
-engine. We perceived that yachtsmen who go out when it happens to suit
-them, between May and September only, can never achieve intimacy with
-the entire individuality of the sea.
-
-The weather has now cleared for a while. The sun is hot, the saloon
-skylight warm to the touch. You throw off a jersey. The tumbling water
-is a scale of deep blues, splendid against the brass of the bollard and
-the reddishness of the spars. The engine is running without a “knock”;
-the sails are nicely filled; the patent log is twirling aft. A small
-rainbow shines steadily in the foam thrown up from the bows, and a great
-rainbow stretches across all heaven, with its own ghost parallel to it.
-Among the large, soft clouds rags of dark cloud are uneasily floating.
-On the flat shores of near islands the same cereals ripen as ripen at
-home. And this is thrilling. Distant islands are miraged. Even a distant
-battleship seems to be lifted clean out of the water by the so-called
-mirage.
-
-And then a trading-schooner, small, but much larger than us,
-relentlessly overhauls us. She laughs at the efforts of our engine to
-aid our sails, and forges ahead, all slanting, with her dinghy slung up
-tight aft, over her rudder. And then it is the still small voice of the
-stomach that speaks. Hunger and repletion follow each other very swiftly
-on such days. The after-breakfast cigar is scarcely finished before
-a genuine curiosity as to the menu of lunch comes to birth within. We
-glance into the saloon. Yes, the white cloth is laid, but we cannot eat
-cloth. The cook and the chronometer are conspiring together against us.
-
-In the afternoon the weather is thick and squally. And we are creeping
-between sad and forlorn veiled islands that seem to exude all the
-melancholy of the seas. There is plenty of water, but only in a
-deceiving horizontal sense. The channel is almost as narrow and
-as tortuous as a Devonshire lane. English charts are criminally
-preposterous, and so are Danish brooms. Hardly can one distinguish
-between a starboard and a port broom. Is the life of a yacht to depend
-on such negligent devices? The skipper is worried. And the spectacle
-of a ship aground in mid-sea does not tranquilize. Sometimes the hail
-wipes out for a few seconds the whole prospect. The eyes of everybody
-are strained with looking for distant brooms.
-
-[Illustration: 0168]
-
-Then we are free of the archipelago, and also the sky clears. The sun,
-turning orange, is behind us, and the wind in our teeth. Ahead is a
-schooner, beating. And she is the schooner of the morning. Our engine
-now has the better of her. As we overtake her, she runs away on one
-tack, and comes back on the next. She bears down on our stern, huge,
-black, glittering. A man and a boy are all her crew. This man and this
-boy are entitled to be called mariners, as distinguished from yachtsmen.
-We can see their faces plainly as they gaze down at us from their high
-deck. And you may see just the same faces on the liners that carry
-emigrants from Denmark to the West, and the same limbs sprawling on
-the decks of the Esbjerg steamers, as the same hands scrawl Danish
-characters on picture postal cards to the inhabitants of these very
-islands.
-
-The sea is now purple, and the schooner a little black blot on the red
-panorama of the sunset; and ahead, amid faint yellow and green fields,
-is a white speck, together with sundry red specks and blue specks. The
-name on the chart! And then the haven is descried, and a ring of masts
-with fluttering rags. And then the lighthouse and the roofs detach
-themselves, and the actual mouth of the haven appears. Twilight falls;
-the engine is moderated; the deck-hand stands by with a pole.
-Very slowly we slide in, and the multitudinous bright tints of the
-fishing-smacks are startlingly gay even in the dusk. The skipper glances
-rapidly about him, and yells out in Dutch to a fisherman, who replies
-in Danish. The skipper shakes his head, at a loss, and gives an order
-to the deck-hand. The deck-hand claws with a pole at a yellow smack.
-We have ceased to be independent. The name on the chart is a name no
-longer. It is a living burg, a poor little place, good enough to sleep
-in, and no more. But another stage on the journey to that magic capital
-Copenhagen.
-
-
-
-
-PART III COPENHAGEN
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER X--THE DANISH CAPITAL
-
-ACROSS the great expanse of Kjoge Bay, Copenhagen first became visible
-as a group of factory chimneys under a firmament of smoke. We approached
-it rapidly upon smooth water, and ran into the narrowing bottle-neck of
-Kallebo, with the main island of Sjælland to the west and the appendant
-island of Amager to the east. Copenhagen stands on both, straddling over
-a wide connecting bridge which carries double lines of electric trams
-and all the traffic of a metropolis. When a yacht, even a small one,
-wishes to enter the harbor, this bridge is cut in two and lifted into
-the air, and the traffic impatiently champs its bit while waiting for
-the yacht.
-
-[Illustration: 0174]
-
-Apparently they understand yachts at Copenhagen, as they do in Holland.
-At the outer harrier of the harbor we were not even requested to stop.
-A cheerful and beneficent functionary cried out for our name, our
-captain’s name, our tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his
-curiosity being sated, waved us onward. The great bridge bisected itself
-for us with singular promptitude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man
-in charge thereof from his high perch signaled to us that our burgee was
-too small. We therefore, having nothing else handy to placate him,
-ran up a blue ensign to the masthead; but it looked so excessively odd
-there, so acutely contrary to the English etiquette of yachts, that we
-at once hauled it down again. No further complaint was made.
-
-We were now in the haven, and over the funnels of many ships we could
-see the city. It was all copper domes and roofs; and we saw that it was
-a proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns to a beautiful green
-instead of to black, as in London. Splendid copper domes are the chief
-symptom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous, tiny provincialism
-of the peninsula and of the islands, it was sensational to find a vast
-capital at the far end of the farthest island. We thought we were coming
-to the end of the world, and we came to a complete and dazzling city
-that surpassed, for example, Brussels in its imposingness. We turned
-westward out of the main channel into the heart of the town, and in a
-moment were tied up to a smack, and the red-and-green bourse was
-leaning over us; the rattle and ringing and stamping of horses, lorries,
-tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deafened us on three sides; and a bridge
-trembling with traffic barred our way.
-
-Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge; crowds stood to gaze at us;
-steamers and warehouses filled the prospect to the north; and under our
-bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copenhagen, each holding a dozen
-passengers or so, continually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific
-din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we had arrived in a grand
-town; we knew that at the first glance.
-
-[Illustration: 0179]
-
-In something less than half an hour one of us had gone forth and
-returned with grave tidings: “This is a most exciting city. I’ve already
-seen lots of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-colored hair.” The
-charm of distant Esbjerg was at last renewed. I went forth myself, into
-a very clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively inhabitants. In
-a trice I had gazed at the Thorvaldsen Museum (which I had no intention
-of entering, Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same artistic plane
-as the inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dordrecht), the Christianborg Palace,
-which had an austere and kingly air, the very modern and admirable
-town hall, the old railway station, which has been transformed into
-the largest kinema in the world, the floating fish shops and fish
-restaurants (made out of old smacks and schooners), the narrow,
-thronged shopping streets, the celebrated Tivoli establishment, and the
-yacht-like steamers that from a quay, which might almost be called the
-gate to Sweden, in the very middle of the town, are constantly setting
-sail for Scandinavia. From Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly
-as in New York you go from Forty-second to Sixty-ninth Street, or
-in London from the Bank to Chelsea, and with less discipline. If the
-steamer has cast off, and the captain sees you hurrying up the street,
-he stops his engines and waits for you, and you are dragged on board by
-a sailer; whereupon the liner departs, unless the captain happens to see
-somebody else hurrying up the street.
-
-An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my
-feet that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped
-back to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no
-more of the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak
-a single word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an
-equipage. What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak
-either English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it
-was overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was
-drawn by two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by
-a liveried being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the
-probable cost of this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not
-care. The ligure named was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the
-carriage during our sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman
-never complained. Possibly because he had no language in which to
-complain. We learned in a moment that his ability to speak French
-was entirely mythical. Then some one said that a misunderstanding had
-occurred at the livery-stables, and that German was the foreign language
-he spoke, But he did not speak German either, nor anything else. He was
-just another of those strange creatures met in the course of travel who
-are born, who mature, and who die without speaking or comprehending any
-language whatever.
-
-From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon
-the rushing population of Copenhagen--beautiful women, with lovely
-tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made
-one mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to
-go to a teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up
-an interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands
-upon thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on
-and on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could
-not stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German
-had no effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed
-in the distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We
-saw an incomprehensible colony of doll’s houses--well-kept suburban huts
-exteriorly resembling houses--in a doll’s garden. We could not conceive
-the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden. Presently
-the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no uniform,
-but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of Hillerup, and
-that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order to traverse
-Hillerup.
-
-It seemed a lot of money; but as it only amounted to sixpence, we paid.
-The man may have been a highwayman. We looked at the map for Hillerup,
-and found it miles away from Copenhagen.
-
-We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless. The driver drove
-on. He conducted us through half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite
-unjustly celebrated “Danish Riviera”; he came actually to the end of
-the tram-line, and then he curved inland into a forest (more to pay). We
-were now angry and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the roads
-in it no direction. Desperate, we signaled to him to turn back. He would
-not. He informed us on his lingers that he would be arriving in twenty
-minutes or so. When he did arrive, we solved the mystery. He had
-confused the word for tea with the word for deer, and had brought us
-to a well-known country resort called the Deer Park. A few miserable
-tourists were in fact drinking cold, bad tea on a windy terrace
-overlooking a distant horizon, far beyond which lay Copenhagen. We
-swallowed the tea, the driver swallowed beer, and we started hack. We
-had no overcoats, and the Baltic evening was cold. Trams overtook us
-flying at a tremendous pace into Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame
-horse. In the dusk we reached once more the desirable city, whose women
-never seemed more fair to us than they did then. This adventure taught
-us that the yachtsman must be prepared for any adventure, even the
-wildest.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XI--CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS
-
-THE most interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large
-foreign city that does not live on its own past is not the museums, but
-the restaurants and cafés, even in the dead season. We were told that
-August was the dead season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at
-the seaside resorts. We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside
-resorts, and they were without exception far more dead than Copenhagen.
-In particular Marienlyst, reputed to be the haunt of fashion and
-elegance, proved to be a very sad, deserted strand. Copenhagen was not
-dead.
-
-We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by
-authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold
-place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of
-hors-d’ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but
-it has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner
-is over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people
-were unceremoniously and expensively eating--in the main hors-d’ouvre.
-The metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great
-restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and
-the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing
-money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies
-of waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on
-Fifth Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the
-wholesale, crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets
-to persons in the swim.
-
-Next we went to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, which was just the restaurant
-of the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and
-you might as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers,
-Brussels, as at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the
-same waiters, the same furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same
-detestable, self-restrained English travelers, with their excruciating
-Englishness. The café on the ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a
-large and busy circular _place_, with the opera and other necessaries of
-metropolitan life close by, was more amusing than the restaurant. It was
-a genuine resort in the afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to
-and fro in front of its canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an
-English yachting party of astounding correctness and complacency (from
-one of those conceited three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white,
-and jeweled in many holes, like a watch), or to a couple of Danish
-commercials, or to a dandy and his love. Here we one night singled out
-for observation a very characteristic Danish young man and young woman
-with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive voices, and the soothing
-gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight; but when we had
-carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered that they were
-an English pair on their honeymoon.
-
-[Illustration: 0186]
-
-In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly
-Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the
-Wiener Café, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room,
-anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the
-somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at
-a rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: “This is the most
-select resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented
-by the flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand
-years. It has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can
-enter here. Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the
-niceties of our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.”
-
-In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an
-English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu
-was in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air
-of a saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the
-_prix fixe_, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, “Will
-you let me have a look at the cake, and then I ‘ll decide.” He replied
-that he could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was
-definitively ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this
-attitude. Cake never had been shown on approval at the Wiener Café
-of the Hotel King of Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head
-before an august tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener Café ought
-to open a branch in London; it was the most English affair I have ever
-encountered out of England.
-
-Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we
-chose the restaurant of the Hotel--------for dinner. The room was darkly
-gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to an empty
-table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three inefficient
-under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for fifteen
-minutes; they had their habitués to serve. At the end of fifteen minutes
-we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing any
-apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely
-omitted to tip.
-
-[Illustration: 0191]
-
-We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a
-restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck
-guided us into the Café de l’Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers
-of this industrious café had that peculiar air, both independent and
-amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that
-is firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No
-selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous
-manners about the Café de l’Industrie, but an aspect of solid, rather
-vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity. It was not cheap,
-neither was it dear. It was gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were
-men of the world, experienced in human nature, occupied, hasty, both
-curt and expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: “Look
-here, I know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, and you
-know them, too. This is not heaven, especially on a Sunday night; but we
-do our best, and you get value for your money.”
-
-The customers were samples of all Copenhagen. They had money to spend,
-but not too much. There were limits to their recklessness in the pursuit
-of joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without affectation, fundamentally
-decent, the average Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and
-spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant. We ate moderately in
-the din and clash of hors d’ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music,
-and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave
-the Hotel --------, with its extreme correctitude.
-
-Finally, among our excursions ‘n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy
-hour in the restaurant of the Hotel --------, supreme example of what
-the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish when it sets
-about to imitate the German _art nouveau_. The -------- is a grand hotel
-in which everything, with the most marvelous and terrifying ingenuity,
-has been designed in defiance of artistic tradition. A fork at the
--------- resembles no other fork on earth, and obviously the designer’s
-first and last thought was to be unique. It did not matter to him what
-kind of fork he produced so long as it was different from any previous
-fork in human history. The same with the table-cloth, the flower-vase,
-the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet, the dado, the frieze, the
-tessellated pavement, the stair-rail, the wash-basin, the bedstead, the
-quilt, the very door-knobs. The proprietors of the place had ordered a
-new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order had been fulfilled. It
-was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly have been costly. It
-was impressive proof of real initiative. It intimidated the beholder,
-who had the illusion of being on another planet. Its ultimate effect was
-to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I doubt whether in Berlin
-itself such ingenious and complete ugliness could be equaled in the
-same cubic space. My idea is that the creators of the Hotel -------- may
-lawfully boast of standing alone on a pinnacle.
-
-It was an inspiration on the part of the creators, when the hotel
-was finished to the last salt-spoon, to order a number of large and
-particularly bad copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames, and
-to hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls. The resulting effect of
-grotesquery is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the -------- justly ranks as
-one of the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that the architect
-and the other designers were forbidden to meddle with the cooking, which
-sins not by any originality.
-
-The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the
-Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only
-say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl’s Court ought to be, and is
-not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst
-of the city, restaurants, cafés, theater, concert-hall, outdoor
-theater, bands, pantomime, vaudeville, dancing-halls, and very numerous
-side-shows on both land and water. The strangest combinations of
-pleasure are possible at the Tivoli. You can, for instance, as we
-did, eat a French dinner while watching a performance of monkeys on a
-tightrope. The opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We
-happened to arrive at Copenhagen just in time for the fêtes celebrating
-the seventieth anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as ancient as it is
-modern. On the great night the Tivoli reveled until morning. It must
-be the pride of the populace of Copenhagen, and one of the city’s
-dominating institutions. It cannot be ignored. It probably uses more
-electric light than any other ten institutions put together. And however
-keenly you may resent its commonplace attraction, that attraction will
-one day magnetize you to enter its gates--at the usual fee.
-
-I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people at once in the
-Tivoli, not a bad total for one resort in a town of only half a million
-inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the
-foreign observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace cf the
-women, which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a
-race the Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and
-simplicity. Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to
-discover how to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous
-or vulgar or brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the
-unassuming middle-class of Copenhagen.
-
-[Illustration: 0197]
-
-There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, “nuts,” rascals,
-obelisks, and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was
-the middle-class, getting value for its money in an agreeable and
-unexceptionable manner. The memory of those thousands wandering lightly
-clad in the cold Northern night, under domes and festoons and pillars
-of electric light, amid the altercations of conflicting orchestras, or
-dancing in vast, stuffy inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating
-hors-d’ouvre under rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to
-Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose glazed aisles were two
-restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just beatifically sitting
-on al-fresco seats in couples--this memory remains important in the
-yachtsman’s experiences of the Baltic.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XII--ARISTOCRACY AND ART
-
-THE harbor-master would not allow us to remain for more than three
-days in our original berth, which served us very well as a sort of grand
-stand for viewing the life of Copenhagen. His theory was that we were
-in the way of honest laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the
-“sound,” on the northeastern edge of the city, where the yachts lie. We
-contested his theory, but we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with
-a bureaucracy of whose language you are ignorant.
-
-The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station,
-and also opposite a shipbuilding yard, and from the west came a strong
-odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. We could have
-tolerated the dust, the noise, and the smell, but what we could not
-tolerate was the heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing and the
-anchorage exposed to it. Indeed, the Royal Danish Yacht Club might
-have chosen more comfortable quarters for itself. We therefore
-unostentatiously weighed anchor again, and reëntered the town, and hid
-ourselves among many businesslike tugs in a little creek called the New
-Haven, whose extremity was conveniently close to the Café d’Angleterre.
-We hoped that the prowling harbor-master would not catch sight of us,
-and he did not.
-
-[Illustration: 0204]
-
-The aristocratic and governing quarter of the town lay about us,
-including the Bregade, a street full of antiquaries, marble churches,
-and baroque houses, and the Amalienborg Palace, which is really four
-separate similar palaces (in an octagonal _place_) thrown into one. Here
-all the prospects and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly
-exclusive. The eighteenth century had nobly survived, when the populace
-was honestly regarded as a horde created by divine providence in order
-that the ruling classes might practise upon it the art of ruling. There
-was no Tivoli when those beautiful pavements were made, and as you stand
-on those pavements and gaze around at the royal grandiosity, speckless
-and complete, you can almost imagine that even the French Revolution has
-not yet occurred. The tiny, colored sentry at the vast, gray gates is
-still living in the eighteenth century. The architecture is not very
-distinguished, but it has style. It shames the -------- Hotel. The
-Frederiks Church, whose copper dome overtops the other copper domes, is
-a fair example of the quarter. Without being in the least a masterpiece,
-it imposes by its sincerity and its sense of its own importance. And the
-interior is kept as scrupulously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the
-marble flooring is wondrous, and each of the crimson cushions in the
-polished pews is like a lady’s pillow. Nothing rude can invade this
-marmoreal fane.
-
-The Rosenborg Palace, not far off, is open to the public, so that all
-may judge what was the life of sovereigns in a small country, and what
-probably still is. The royal villas outside Florence are very ugly, but
-there is a light grace about their furnishing which lifts them far above
-the heavy, stuffy, tasteless mediocrity of such homes as the Rosenborg.
-Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed with the miscellaneous ugliness
-of generations of royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight to
-people of taste; and the few very lovely tilings that have slipped in
-here and there by inadvertence only intensify its mournfulness. The
-phantoms of stupid courtiers seem to pervade, strictly according to
-etiquette, its gloomy salons. And yet occasionally, in the disposition
-of an arm-chair or a screen, one realizes that it must, after all, have
-been a home, inhabited by human beings worthy of sympathy. It is the
-most bourgeois home I ever entered. In a glass case, with certain
-uniforms, were hung the modern overcoat (a little frayed) and the hat
-of a late monarch. They touched the heart of the sardonic visitor, their
-exposure was so naive.
-
-Even more depressing than this mausoleum of nineteenth-century maimers
-was the museum of art. As a colossal negation of art, this institution
-ranks with the museum of Lausanne. It is an enormous and ugly building,
-full of enormous ugliness in painting and sculpture. It contained a fine
-Rembrandt--“Christ at Emmaus”--and one good modern picture, a plowing
-scene by Wilhelmson. We carefully searched the immense rooms for another
-good modern picture, and found it not. Even the specimens of Gauguin,
-Van Gogh, and Bonnard were mediocre.
-
-The sculpture was simply indescribable. The eye roamed like a bird
-over the waters of the deluge, and saw absolutely nothing upon which
-to alight with safety. Utter desolation reigned. The directors of this
-museum had never, save in the case of Wilhelmson, been guilty of an
-inadvertence. Their instinct against beauty in any form was unerring.
-Imagine the stony desert of rooms and corridors and giant staircases
-on a wet Sunday morning, echoing to the footsteps of the simple holiday
-crowd engaged patriotically in the admiration of Danish art; imagine
-ingenuous, mackintoshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and
-terrific marble Venuses and other gods; imagine the whispering in front
-of anecdotes in paint; imagine the Inferno of an artist--and you have
-the art museum, the abode and lurking-place of everlasting tedium.
-
-Quite different is the Glyptothek, a museum whose existence is due
-to private enterprise and munificence. It is housed in an ugly and
-ill-planned building, but the contents are beautiful, very well
-arranged, and admirably exposed. The Glyptothek has an entrancing
-small picture by Tiepolo, of Antony and Cleopatra meeting, which I was
-informed must be a study for a larger picture in Venice It alone should
-raise the museum to a shrine of pilgrimage, and it is not even mentioned
-in Baedeker! But the Glyptothek triumphs chiefly by its sculpture. Apart
-from its classical side, it has a superb collection of Meuniers, which
-impressed, without greatly pleasing, me; a roomful of Rodin busts which
-are so honest and lifelike and jolly that when you look at them you want
-to laugh--you must laugh from joy. And the Carpeaux busts of beautiful
-women--what a profound and tranquil satisfaction n gazing at them!
-
-[Illustration: 0209]
-
-Some of the rooms at the Glyptothek are magical in their effect on
-the sensibility. They would make you forget wife and children, yachts,
-income tax, and even the Monroe Doctrine. Living Danish women were
-apposite enough to wander about the sculpture rooms for our delectation,
-making delicious contrasts against the background of marble groups.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIII--THE RETURN
-
-WE left Copenhagen with regrets, for the entity of the town was very
-romantic and attractive. Even the humble New Haven, where we sheltered
-from the eye of the harbor-master, had its charm for us. It was the real
-sailors’ quarter, thoroughly ungentlemanly and downright. The shops on
-each side of the creek were below the level of the street and even of
-the water, and every one of them was either a café, with mysterious
-music heating behind glazed doors, or an emporium of some sort for
-sailors. Revelries began in the afternoon. You might see a nice neat
-Danish wife guiding an obstreperously intoxicated Danish sailor down the
-steps leading to a cigar shop. Not a pleasant situation for a nice wife!
-But, then, you reflected that he was a sailor, and that he had doubtless
-been sober and agreeable a short while before, and would soon be sober
-and agreeable again; and that perhaps there were great compensations
-in his character. At night Bacchus and Pan were the true gods of that
-quarter, and the worship of them was loud and yet harmonious.
-
-We prepared reluctantly to depart; the engine also. The engine would not
-depart, and it was a new engine. Two hours were spent in wheedling and
-conciliating its magneto. After that the boat traveled faster than it
-had ever traveled. We passed out of Copenhagen into the sound, leaving
-a noble array of yachts behind, and so up the sound. Soon Copenhagen
-was naught but a bouquet of copper domes, and its beautiful women became
-legendary with us, and our memory heightened their beauty. And then the
-engine developed a “knock.” Now, in a small internal-combustion engine
-a “knock” may be due to bad petrol or to a misplacement of the magneto
-or to a hundred other schisms in the secret economy of the affair.
-We slowed to half-speed and sought eagerly the origin of the “knock,”
- which, however, remained inexplicable. We were engloomed; we were in
-despair.
-
-We had just decided to stop the engine when it stopped of itself, with a
-fearful crash of broken metal One side of the casing was shattered. The
-skipper’s smile was tragical. The manliness of all of us trembled under
-the severity of the ordeal which fate had administered. To open out
-the engine-box and glance at the wreck in the depths thereof was
-heart-rending. We could not closely examine the chaos of steel and brass
-because it was too hot, but we knew that the irremediable had occurred
-in the bowels of the _Velsa_. We made sail, and crawled back to the
-sound, and mournfully anchored with our unseen woe among the other
-yachts.
-
-The engine was duly inspected bit by bit; and it appeared that only the
-bearing of the forward piston was broken, certainly owing to careless
-mounting of the engine in the shops. It was an enormous catastrophe, but
-perhaps not irremediable.
-
-Indeed, within a short time the skipper was calculating that he could
-get a new bearing made in Copenhagen in twenty-four hours. Anyhow,
-we had to reconcile ourselves to a second visit to Copenhagen. And
-Copenhagen, a few hours earlier so sweet a name in our ears, was now
-hateful to us, a kind of purgatory to which we were condemned for the
-sins of others.
-
-[Illustration: 0216]
-
-The making and fitting of the new bearing occupied just seventy hours.
-During this interminable period we enjoyed the scenery of the sound and
-grew acquainted with its diverse phenomena. The weather, if wet, was
-calm, and the surface of the water smooth; but every steamer that passed
-would set up a roll that flung hooks, if not crockery, about the saloon.
-And the procession of steamers in both directions was constant from
-five a. m. to midnight. They came from and went to every part of
-the archipelago and of Sweden and of northern Germany. We gradually
-understood that at Copenhagen railways are a trifle, and the sea a
-matter of the highest importance. Nearly all traffic is seaborne.
-
-We discovered, too, that the immediate shore of the sound, and of the
-yacht-basin scooped out of it, was a sort of toy seaside resort for
-the city. Part of the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club
-is housed was used as a public restaurant, with a fine terrace that
-commanded the yacht-club landing-stage and all the traffic of the sound.
-Moreover, it was a good restaurant, except that the waiters seemed to be
-always eating some titbit on the sly.
-
-Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure of the sound. The
-czar’s yacht came to anchor, huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with
-a blue-and-white standard large enough to make a suit of sails for a
-schooner--the biggest yacht afloat, I think, but not a pleasing object,
-though better than the antique ship of the Danish king. The unwieldy
-ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed to surround this pompous
-vessel, and the solitary tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest
-in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futility of saluting guns! The two
-English royal yachts, both of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in
-every way strikingly superior to the Russian.
-
-Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that restaurant terrace.
-At night the steamers would slip down out of Copenhagen one after the
-other to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving parterre of
-electricity on the darkness. And then we would walk along the nocturnal
-shore and find it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose bicycles
-were often stacked in groups, too. And the little yachts in the little
-yacht-basin were each an illuminated household! A woman would emerge
-from a cabin and ask a question of a man on the dark bank, and he would
-flash a lantern-light in her face like a missile, and “Oh!” she would
-cry. And farther on the great hulk which is the home of the Copenhagen
-Amateur Sailing Club would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from
-within it would come the sounds of song and the laughter of two sexes.
-And then we would yell, “_Velsa_, ahoy!” and keep on yelling until all
-the lightly clad couples were drawn out of the chilly night like moths
-by the strange English signaling. And at last the _Velsa_ would wake
-up, and the dinghy would detach itself from her side, and we would go
-aboard. But not until two o’clock or so would the hilarity and music of
-the Amateur Sailing Club cease, and merge into a frantic whistling for
-taxicabs from the stand beyond the restaurant.
-
-Then a few hours’ slumber, broken by nightmares of the impossibility of
-ever quitting Copenhagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness
-of the dismantled engine, and over the water at the yachts dozing
-and rocking in the dawn. And on a near yacht, out of the maw of a
-forecastle-hatch left open for air, a half-dressed sailor would appear,
-and yawn, and stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the
-yacht’s deck.
-
-[Illustration: 0221]
-
-The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; and the
-first of the morning steamers would arrive from some mystical distant
-island, a vessel, like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons, red
-and black funnels, the captain looking down at us from the bridge; a
-nice handful of passengers, including a few young women in bright
-hats; everything damp and fresh, and everybody expectant and braced
-for Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary sight! And then our skipper would
-emerge, and the cook with my morning apple on a white plate. And the
-skipper would say, “We ought to be able to make a start to-day, sir.”
- And on the third day we did make a start, the engine having been
-miraculously recreated; and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.
-
-
-
-
-PART IV--ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIV--FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
-
-WE waited for the weather a day and a night at Folkestone, which,
-though one of the gateways of England, is a poor and primitive place to
-lie in. Most of the time we were on the mud, and to get up into England
-we had to climb a craggy precipice called the quay-wall. Nevertheless,
-the harbor (so styled) is picturesque, and in the less respectable
-part of the town, between the big hotels and band-stands and the
-mail-steamers; there are agreeable second-hand book shops, in one of
-which I bought an early edition of Gray’s poems bound in ancient vellum.
-
-The newspapers were very pessimistic about the weather, and smacks
-occasionally crept in for shelter, with wild reports of what was going
-on in the channel. At four o’clock in the morning, however, we started,
-adventurous, for the far coasts of Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel
-was a gray and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale. And I
-also was weary and uneasy, for it is impossible for a civilized person
-of regular habits to arise at four a. m. without both physical and
-psychical suffering, and the pleasure derived from the experience,
-though real, is perverse. The last gleams of the Gris-Nez and the Varne
-lights were visible across the heaving waste, feebly illuminating the
-intense melancholy of the dawn. There was nothing to do except steer
-and keep your eyes open, because a favorable and moderate southwest wind
-rendered the engine unnecessary. The ship, and the dinghy after her,
-pitched and rolled over the heavy swell. The skipper said naught. I said
-naught. The lights expired. The dark gray of the sea turned to steel.
-The breeze was icy. Vitality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed
-exceedingly remote, even unattainable. Great, vital questions presented
-themselves to the enfeebled mind, cutting at the very root of all
-conduct and all ambitions. What was the use of yachting? What was the
-use of anything? Why struggle? Why exist? The universe was too vast, and
-the soul homeless therein.
-
-And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray,
-and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a
-white cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and
-potent draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances
-of beauty! Only the finest China tea is employed aboard the _Velsa_.
-I drank, and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was
-transformed. We began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling
-over, spurted. It was a grand life. We descried the French coast. The
-hours flew. Before breakfast-time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between
-the piers at Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine. At 8:15 we ran
-her on the mud, on a rising tide, next to a pilot-boat, the _Jean et
-Marie_, inhabited by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp to
-the Quai Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and considered ourselves fairly
-in France.
-
-[Illustration: 0228]
-
-The officials of the French republic on the quay had been driven by
-the spectacle of our peculiar Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange,
-emotional attitudes; and as soon as we were afloat, the French republic
-came aboard in a dinghy manned by two acolytes. The skipper usually
-receives the representatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper
-speaks no French, and as this was the first time I had entered France
-in this style, I thought I would be my own ambassador. I received the
-French republic in my saloon; we were ravishingly polite to each other;
-we murmured sweet compliments to each other. He gave me a clean bill of
-health, and went off with four francs and one half-penny. There is no
-nation like the French. A French milliner will make a hat out of a
-piece of felt and nothing; and a French official will make a diplomatic
-episode out of nothing at all, putting into five minutes of futility all
-the Gallic civilization of centuries.
-
-Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly
-limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes
-on is extraordinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence a flag
-flies to warn the surrounding seas when the entrance is occupied or
-about to be occupied. The state of the tide is also indicated, and the
-expert can read from hieroglyphics slung in the air the exact depth of
-water at a particular moment between the piers. In addition, of course,
-there is the weather signaling. We had scarcely been in port a couple
-of hours before the weather signaling shocked us; nay, we took it as
-an affront to ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the
-tail-end of one south gale, and now another was predicted! How could
-small people like us hope to work our way down to Brittany in the teeth
-of the gale! And I had an appointment in the harbor of Carantec, a tiny
-village near Morlaix, in a week’s time! The thing was monstrous. But the
-south cone was hoisted, and it remained hoisted. And the cone is
-never displayed except for a real gale,--not a yachtsman’s gale, but a
-sailor’s gale, which is serious.
-
-A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American liner in the roads. We
-followed her along the jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was
-already blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the horizon. Soon we
-were in the midst of a squall ourselves. The rain hid everything for a
-minute. It cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet, with the
-variegated bathing-tents, from which even then beautiful creatures were
-bathing in a shallow surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex
-roofs of Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top,
-and the illimitable dunes that are a feature of this part of the
-country. Above all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue. The
-skipper did not like those thunder-clouds; he said they were the most
-dangerous of all clouds, “because anything might come out of them.” He
-spoke as if they already contained in their bosoms every conceivable
-sort of weather, which they would let loose according to their caprice.
-
-The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled us to hold tight to the
-rail of the pier. A poster announced that in the casino behind the
-rain, Suppé’s “Boccaccio” was to be performed that night, and Massenet’s
-“Thaïs” the next night. And opera seemed a very artificial and
-unnecessary form of activity as we stood out there in the reality of
-the storm. The Atlantic liner had now bid good-by to the tender, and was
-hugely moving. She found sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of
-her bigness, and headed straight into the gale, pitching like a toy. The
-rain soon veiled her, and she was gone. I could not picture the _Velsa_
-in such a situation, at any rate with the owner on board. We went back,
-rather pensive, to the Quai Chanzy.
-
-[Illustration: 0234]
-
-The men in the pilot-boat alongside the _Velsa_ were not in the least
-reassuring as to the chances of the _Velsa_ ever getting to Brittany;
-but they were uplifted because the weather was too rough for them to go
-out. When the cone is on view, the pilot-service is accomplished by a
-powerful steam-vessel. Our friends, in their apparently happy idleness,
-sculled forth in a dinghy about fifty yards from where we lay, and
-almost immediately rejoined us with three eels that they had caught.
-I bought the three eels for two shillings, and the cook cooked them
-perfectly, and I ate one of them with ecstasy a few hours later; but
-eels are excessively antipathetic to the digestive organs, and may
-jaundice the true bright color of the world for days.
-
-The transaction of the eels, strengthened our intimacy with the pilot’s
-crew, who imparted to us many secrets; as, for example, that they were
-the selfsame men who act as porters at the quay for the transfer of
-luggage when the cross-channel steamers arrive and depart. On one day
-they are the pilot’s crew, and on the next they are porters to carry
-your handbags through the customs. This was a blow to me, because on
-the innumerable occasions when I had employed those porters I had always
-regarded them as unfortunate beings who could earn money only during
-about an hour each day, victims of the unjust social system, etc., and
-who were therefore specially deserving of compassion and tips. I now
-divined that their activities were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed
-together like a Chinese puzzle, and all reasonably remunerative. The
-which was very French and admirable. Herein was a valuable lesson to me,
-and a clear saving in future of that precious commodity, compassion.
-
-In a day or two the horrid fact emerged that we were imprisoned in
-Boulogne. The south cone did not budge. Neither could we. The tide
-ebbed; the tide flowed; we sank softly into the mud; we floated again.
-A sailor cut our warp because it was in his way, and therefore incurred
-our anger and the comminations of the harbor-master. But we were
-not released. An aeroplane meeting was announced, and postponed. We
-witnessed the preparations for the ceremonial opening of a grand new
-dock. We went to the casino and listened to Russian music, which in
-other circumstances would have enchanted us.
-
-But none of these high matters could hold our attention. Even when the
-cook criticized our water-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly
-that he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought proofs of his genius cut
-of the forecastle, even then we were not truly interested. We thirsted
-to depart, and could not. Our sole solace was to walk round and round
-the basini in the rain-squalls, and observe their tremendous vitality,
-which, indeed, never ceased, day or night save at low water, when most
-craft were aground.
-
-At such periods of tranquillity the trucks of the fishing-smacks were
-nearly level with the quay, and we noticed that every masthead was
-elaborately finished with gilded sculpture--a cross, a star, or a small
-figure of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or an angel. The names, too, of these
-smacks were significant: _Resurrection, Jesus-Marie_, and so on. The
-ornamentation of the deck-houses and companions of these vessels showed
-a great deal of fantasy and brilliant color, though little taste. And
-the general effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demonstrating, as it
-did, that the boats were beloved. English fishing-boats are beloved by
-their owners, but English affection does not disclose itself in the same
-way, if it discloses itself at all. On the third afternoon we assisted
-at the departure of an important boat for the herring fisheries. It had
-a crew of seventeen men, all dressed in brown, young and old, and
-an enormous quantity of gear. It bore the air of a noble cooperative
-enterprise, and went off on the tide, disdainfully passing the
-still-hoisted cone.
-
-Perhaps it was this event that gave us to think. If a herring-boat could
-face the gale, why not we? Our ship was very seaworthy, and the coast
-was dotted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible to go south,
-since we could not have made headway. Then why not boldly cancel the
-rendezvous in Brittany, and run northward before the gale? The skipper
-saluted the idea with enthusiasm. He spoke of Ostend. He said that if
-the wind held we could easily run to Ostend in a day. He did not care
-for Ostend, but it would be a change. I, however, did care for Ostend.
-And so it was decided that, unless the wind went right round in the
-night, we would clear out of Boulogne at the earliest tidal hour the
-next morning. The joy of expectancy filled the ship, and I went into
-the town to buy some of the beautiful meat-pies that are offered in its
-shops.
-
-[Illustration: 0239]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XV--TO BELGIUM
-
-AT 6 a. M. we, too, were passing disdainfully the still-hoisted cone.
-Rain descended in sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we
-did not happen to be in the rain, we could see rain-squalls of the most
-theatrical appearance in every quarter of the horizon. The gale had
-somewhat moderated, but not the sea; the wind, behind us, was against
-the tide, and considerably quarreling therewith. Now we were inclosed in
-walls of water, and now we were balanced on the summit of a mountain of
-water, and had a momentary view of many leagues of tempest. I
-personally had never been out in such weather in anything smaller than a
-mail-steamer.
-
-Here I must deal with a distressing subject, which it would be
-pleasanter to ignore, but which my training in realism will not allow
-me to ignore. A certain shameful crime is often committed on yachts,
-merchantmen, and even men-of-war. It is notorious that Nelson committed
-this crime again and again, and that other admirals have copied his
-iniquity. Sailors, and particularly amateur sailors, would sooner be
-accused of any wickedness rather than this. Charge them with cheating at
-cards, ruining innocent women, defrauding the Government, and they will
-not blench; but charge them with this offense, and they will blush, they
-will recriminate, and they will lie disgracefully against all evidence;
-they cannot sit still under the mere suspicion of it.
-
-As we slipped out of the harbor that morning the secret preoccupation
-of the owner and his friend was that circumstances might tempt them to
-perpetrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say that they withstood
-the awful temptation; but only just! If out of bravado they had
-attempted to eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would assuredly
-have been committed, but they had the sense to order the meals to be
-served in the cockpit, in the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter
-the conditions! They were saved from turpitude, and they ate heartily
-thrice during the day. And possibly nobody was more astonished than
-themselves at their success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an
-expert, a member of an exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course
-shoreward in circumstances not devoid of danger.
-
-“What are you about?” was the affrighted question. He replied:
-
-“I’m going to beach her. If I don’t, I shall be sick, and I won’t be
-sick aboard this yacht.”
-
-Such is the astounding influence of convention, which has transformed
-into a crime a misfortune over which the victim has no control whatever.
-We did not beach the _Velsa_, nor were our appetites impaired. We were
-lucky, and merely lucky; and yet we felt as proud as though we had,
-by our own skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of. This is
-human nature.
-
-As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the most majestic natural
-scenes I have ever witnessed, not a gale, but about half of a gale, was
-blowing. The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the tide was slack,
-and between Calais and Dunkirk we had it under our feet, and were able
-to dispense with the engine and still do six and a half knots an hour.
-Thenceforward the weather grew calm with extraordinary rapidity, while
-the barometer continuously fell. At four o’clock the wind had entirely
-expired, and we restarted the engine, and crawled past Westend and
-Nieuport, resorts very ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from
-the sea. By the time we sighted the whiteness of the kursaal at Ostend
-the water was as flat as an Inland lake.
-
-[Illustration: 0246]
-
-The sea took on the most delicate purple tints, and the pallor of the
-architecture of Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were yet a mile
-and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies with stings wandered out from
-the city to meet us.
-
-We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at 6:10 p. m., and the skipper
-was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering in the basin, he
-leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:
-
-“I ‘ve had a bit o’ luck this week.”
-
-“With the engine?” I suggested, for the engine had been behaving itself
-lately.
-
-“No, sir. My wife presented me with a little boy last Tuesday. I had the
-letter last night. I’ve been expecting it.” But he had said nothing to
-me before. He blushed, adding, “I should like you to do me a very great
-favor, sir--give me two days off soon, so that I can go to the baptism.”
- Strange, somehow, that a man should have to ask a favor to be present
-at the baptism of his own son! The skipper now has two sons. Both, I was
-immediately given to understand, are destined for the sea. He has six
-brothers-in-law, and they all follow the sea. On a voyage he will never
-willingly leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will rush down
-to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow it in two minutes and a half,
-and rush back. I said to him once:
-
-“I believe you must be fond of this wheel.”
-
-“I am, sir,” he said, and grinned.
-
-We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and our rudder was within
-a foot of the street. Next to us lay the _Velsa’s_ sister (occasion for
-the historic remark that “the world is very small”), a yacht well known
-to the skipper, of exactly the same lines as the _Velsa_, nearly the
-same size, and built within four miles of her in the same year! The
-next morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were equally drenched in
-tremendous downpours of rain, but made no complaint to each other. I
-had the awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon
-skylights open.
-
-The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness of Ostend. Like
-sundry other cities, Ostend has two individualities, two souls. All
-that fronts the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is grandiose,
-cosmopolitan, insincere, taciturn, blatant, and sterile. It calls
-itself the finest sea-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is
-as factitious as a meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is
-Belgian, more than Belgian--Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident,
-simple, unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are
-full of little cafés that are full of little men and fat women. All the
-little streets are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum
-quantity of sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs
-drawing little carts hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars
-and the whistling of railway engines.
-
-On this Sunday morning there was a band festival of some kind, upon
-which the pitiless rain had no effect whatever. Band after band swung
-past our rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some marketing to do, as
-the cook declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish,
-and we waited impatiently under umbrellas for the procession of bands
-to finish. It would not finish, and we therefore had to join it. All the
-way up the Rue de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves speak in the
-brazen uproar; and all the brass instruments and all the dark uniforms
-of the puffy instrumentalists were glittering and melting in the rain.
-Occasionally at the end of the street, over the sea, lightning feebly
-flickered against a dark cloud. At last I could turn off into a
-butcher’s shop, where under the eyes of a score of shopping matrons I
-purchased a lovely piece of beef for the nominal price of three francs
-seventy-five centimes, and bore it off with pride into the rain.
-
-When we got back to the yacht with well-baptized beef and vegetal
-des and tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the
-interesting and romantic city. Asked what he was about, he replied:
-
-“I’m going to buy a curio, sir; that’s all.” He knew the city. He had
-been to Ostend before in a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither
-interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the
-country. “There’s a pretty walk over there,” he said; “but there’s
-nothing here,” pointing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for
-twenty years, and enjoying it like a child, but the deck-hand, with one
-soft-voiced sentence, took it off the map.
-
-In the afternoon, winding about among the soaked cosmopolitanism of
-the promenade, I was ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy
-fashionable affectations more surely than a wet Sunday, and the
-promenade seemed to rank first in the forlorn tragedies of the world.
-I returned yet again to the yacht, and was met by the skipper with a
-disturbed face.
-
-“We can’t get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n’t allowed to work on
-Sundays. _Everything’s changed in Belgium._” The skipper was too Dutch
-to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was rising in him--the
-passion to go somewhere else.
-
-“All right,” I said; “we ‘ll manage with mineral water, and then we ‘ll
-move on to Bruges.” In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than
-to be standing still.
-
-But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the railway bridge would not
-swing for us, nor would it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our
-siren. Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skipper. He said that
-he was not supposed to swing for _canal-boats_.
-
-“Canal-boat!” the skipper cried. “By what canal do you think I brought
-this ship across the North Sea?” He was coldly sarcastic, and his
-sarcasm forced the bridge open. We passed through, set our sails, and
-were presently heeling over and washing a wave of water up the banks of
-the canal. I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge, I shaved
-it as close as I could for the fun of the thing. Whereupon the skipper
-became excited, and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal,
-because the barges were no stronger than cigar-boxes, having sides
-only an inch thick, and would crumble at a touch; and the whole
-barge-population of Belgium and Holland, but especially Belgium, was in
-a conspiracy to extract damages out of yachts on the slightest pretext.
-It seemed to me that the skipper’s alarm was exaggerated. I understood
-it a few days later, when he related to me that he had once quite
-innocently assisted at the cracking of a cigar-box, for which his
-employer had had to pay five thousand francs.
-
-[Illustration: 0251]
-
-The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails
-set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion
-on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good
-order.
-
-Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the
-weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that
-summer! The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through
-the water, and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing
-than the sails. And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon
-of the monotonous tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little
-village resembles every other little village. We had to invent something
-to pass the time, and we were unwise enough to measure the speed of
-the engine on this smooth water in this unusual calm. A speed trial
-is nearly always an error of tact, for the reason that it shatters
-beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful illusion that under favorable
-conditions the engine would drive the yacht at the rate of twelve
-kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts at every hundred
-meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test gave seven and
-a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The distances must be
-wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious. The next test
-gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to the engine,
-and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing even that the
-dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of the test
-was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.
-
-Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk
-along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it,
-and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters;
-and by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges
-in the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better
-engine than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth
-in a collapse. Nevertheless the _Velsa_ had been a most pleasing object
-as seen from the bank.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVI--BRUGES
-
-WE moored at the Quai Spinola, with one of the most picturesque
-views in Bruges in front of us, an irresistible temptation to the
-watercolorist, even in wet weather. I had originally visited Bruges
-about twenty years earlier. It was the first historical and consistently
-beautiful city I had ever seen, and even now it did not appear to have
-sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably superior to Ghent, which is a
-far more important place, but in which I have never been fortunate.
-
-[Illustration: 0258]
-
-Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a
-finer attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the
-restaurants of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is
-the medieval castle of the counts of Flanders, an endless field for
-sociological speculation, but transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent
-is a modern town in an old suit of clothes, and its inhabitants are more
-formidably Belgian than those of any other large city of Flanders.
-I speak not of the smaller industrial places, where Belgianism is
-ferocious and terrible.
-
-At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to
-Notre Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon
-Michelangelo’s “Virgin and Child,” a major work. Then to the streets
-and lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth.
-Kinematographs, amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be
-expected, for no show-city in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do
-they not enliven and illumine the ground floors of some of the grandest
-renaissance palaces in Florence? But there were changes more startling
-than the advent kinematographs.
-
-Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the
-street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of
-Bruges will be using electricity.
-
-Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals,
-and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges “The
-Venice of the North.” I admit that my feelings were hurt--not by the
-motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the
-North, than Venice is the Bruges of the South.
-
-We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and
-penetrate us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs
-grew more brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the
-restaurants of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from
-the Grande Place and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the
-time of day. Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at
-the Hôtel du Panier d’Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with
-the fattest landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready
-among its bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep.
-The Panier d’Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving
-tourist who could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to
-spend more than seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d’Or
-one was sure to encounter other travelers who took both art and life
-seriously.
-
-No, we would not dine at the Panier d’Or, because we would not disturb
-our memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior,
-and we slipped into the café restaurant next door, and were served by
-a postulant boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human
-nature, but who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with
-the exquisite melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to
-move. We drank coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white
-cloths were removed from the tables; and the long, high room became
-a café simply. A few middle-aged male habitués wandered in
-separately,--four in all,--and each sat apart and smoked and drank beer.
-The mournfulness was sweet and overwhelming. It was like chloroform.
-The reflection that each of these sad, aging men had a home and an
-_intimité_ somewhere in the spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of
-Bruges, that each was a living soul with aspirations and regrets, this
-reflection was excruciating in its blend of forlornness and comedy.
-
-A few more habitués entered, and then a Frenchman and a young
-Frenchwomen appeared on a dais at the back of the café and opened a
-piano. They were in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the
-eccentricities of the _cafe-chantant_, and they produced no effect
-whatever on the faces or in the gestures of the habitués, They
-performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played. Just the common
-songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but more inane than
-vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red mouth which
-is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured disposition
-They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody smiled.
-Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is
-acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habitués doggedly read
-newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The
-economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices
-of food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or
-on behalf of the artists.
-
-At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed,
-because we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed.
-Yes, incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in
-Bruges. And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls
-in white were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We
-glimpsed them through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph
-a bell was ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no
-habitués were responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of
-the belfry flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of
-these and of the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps,
-after all, Bruges had not changed.
-
-[Illustration: 0263]
-
-We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the
-Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of
-large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited
-by the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much
-wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was
-supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street,
-beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold
-it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of
-tourists.
-
-As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the
-belfry suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the
-clockwork chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells,
-a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing,
-as different from that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a
-barrel-organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine
-force. Bruges was no more a hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers
-and amateur painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their
-attendant chaplains. It was the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed
-before I had ever even seen the place--just that.
-
-[Illustration: 0267]
-
-Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded
-up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again,
-reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed
-under the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which
-are alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according
-to the instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the
-maze upon a long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was
-set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by
-high towers, and by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the
-lake floated the _Velsa_, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be
-real, and yet real. It was the most magical thing.
-
-We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst
-of the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had
-rounded Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof
-enough of the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and
-heavy lee-boards for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some
-yachtsmen, and expert yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge.
-But no ordinary yacht of the _Velsas_ size could have scraped into that
-lake by the Quai Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. The
-_Velsa_ might have been designed specially for the background of Bruges.
-She fitted it with exquisite perfection.
-
-And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered
-her more domestic than the very houses around, which were without
-exception dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went
-gingerly aboard across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning
-in gazed again at the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a
-little way off the kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a
-Parisian couple singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls
-coarsely dancing.
-
-
-
-
-PART V--EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA
-
-AFTER the exoticism of foreign parts, this chapter is very English.
-But no island could be more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baffling
-than this island. I had a doubt about the propriety of using the phrase
-“East Anglia” in the title. I asked, therefore, three educated people
-whether the northern part of Essex could be termed East Anglia,
-according to current usage. One said he did n’t know. The next said
-that East Anglia began only north of the Stour. The third said that East
-Anglia extended southward as far as anybody considered that it ought to
-extend southward. He was a true Englishman. I agreed with him. England
-was not made, but born. It has grown up to a certain extent, and its
-pleasure is to be full of anomalies, like a human being. It has to be
-seen to be believed.
-
-Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town, twelve miles distant. After
-assessment, particulars of it are forwarded to another town in another
-county, and the formal demand for payment is made from there; but the
-actual payment has to be made in a third town, about twenty miles from
-either of the other two. What renders England wondrous is not such
-phenomena, but the fact that Englishmen see nothing singular in such
-phenomena.
-
-East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of
-England, and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very
-early in history, and many of their descendants, full of the original
-Anglian ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no
-place is more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center
-on the east coast, and the home port of the _Velsa_. Theoretically
-and officially, Harwich is the home port of the _Velsa_, but not in
-practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to
-accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea,
-except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some
-excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
-
-Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193
-different spellings of the name.
-
-Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was “a member of the Cinque
-Ports.” Not _one_ of the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically there
-were seven, but a member. A “member” was subordinate, and Brightlingsea
-was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared in the
-responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven ships
-for the king’s service every year. In return it shared in the privilege
-of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a few
-useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many
-decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after
-all, it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442.
-The charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: “To all the
-faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors
-and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.” By
-this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts,
-of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the “bonaventure
-mizen”; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity
-of the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of
-navigation.
-
-Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to
-suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing-
-or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested
-at the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars
-kicked up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of
-traveling fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships
-now at Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea
-with an astrolabe; the “bonaventure mizen” is no more; smuggling is
-unfashionable; fast craft are encouraged.
-
-Nevertheless, on a summer’s morning I have left the _Velsa_ in the
-dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten
-minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border
-of pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the
-whole visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original
-Angles first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era
-is reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water,
-and the Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the
-pristine reigns as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of
-the scene is indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what
-to look for. I was telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful
-flatness of Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. “But aren’t you educated
-up to flats?” he asked. I said I was. He persisted. “But are you
-educated up to mud, the lovely colors on a mud-flat?” He was a true
-connoisseur of Essex. The man who is incapable of being ravished by
-a thin, shallow tidal stream running between two wide, shimmering mud
-banks that curve through a strictly horizontal marsh, without a tree,
-without a shrub, without a bird, save an eccentric sea-gull, ought not
-to go yachting in Essex estuaries.
-
-[Illustration: 0278]
-
-Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it
-catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about
-fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular
-industry has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort
-only yesterday; that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It
-has, however, steadily progressed, until now, despite every natural
-disadvantage and every negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty
-yachts and some eight hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot
-get into Brightlingsea at all from the high sea without feeling her
-way among sand-banks,--in old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the
-inhabitants made a profitable specialty of salving wrecks,--and when a
-yacht has successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really
-the estuary of the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of
-Brightlingsea Creek, her difficulties will multiply.
-
-In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek
-is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the
-mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake
-the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the
-Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there
-is no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from
-the shore, which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these
-perils, she will almost certainly run into something, or something
-will run into her, or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves.
-Yachts, barges, smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored
-anywhere and anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack
-always deems a yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor
-somewhere, and asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or
-ever has existed or ever will. Historical tradition--sacred! All craft
-do as they like, and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its
-sides.
-
-Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can
-see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea
-and the yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is
-uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting.
-Yachts go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from
-choice. Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place,
-because any place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be
-a wonderful place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you
-can reconcile yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all,
-really harmonizes rather well with the mud-flats of the county.
-
-An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is
-dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go
-for an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always
-exciting because you never know when you may be able to return. Even the
-_Velsa_, which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle
-of the fair and wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages
-of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge, facing each other across the river, both
-inordinately picturesque, and both given up to the industry of yachting.
-At Wivenhoe large yachts and even ships are built, and in winter there
-is always a choice selection of world-famous yachts on the mud, costly
-and huge gewgaws, with their brass stripped off them, painfully forlorn,
-stranded in a purgatory between the paradise of last summer and the
-paradise of the summer to come.
-
-If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches,
-and as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once
-more into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow
-stream, two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them.
-This is your world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for
-several miles; and then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great
-barges against a quay, and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and
-above the quay rise the towers and steeples of a city that was already
-ancient when William the Conqueror came to England in the interests of
-civilization to take up the white man’s burden,--Colchester, where more
-oysters are eaten on a certain night of the year at a single feast than
-at any other feast on earth. Such is the boast.
-
-But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the
-contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on
-the map of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in
-confluence with the River Orwell (which truly _is_ in East Anglia) it
-forms a goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a
-fairly important naval port, and also “a gate of the empire,” where
-steamers go forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We
-came into Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon,
-with the sea a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the
-entrance to the Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, the _Blake_
-and the _Blenheim_, each apparently larger than the whole of the town of
-Harwich. Up the Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was
-moored a fleet of forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in
-a quadruple line. It was necessary for the _Velsa_ to review this fleet
-of astoundingly ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the
-high satisfaction of the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of
-Sunday afternoon was thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest.
-On every sinister ship--the _Basilisk_, the _Harpy_, etc., apposite
-names!--the young bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were
-trying bravely to amuse themselves. The sound of the jews’-harp and of
-the concertina was heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles
-of men squatted here and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing
-at some game. A few students were reading; some athletes were sparring;
-many others skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines.
-Launches and longboats were flitting about full of young men, going
-on leave to the ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning
-therefrom. Every sound and noise was clearly distinguishable in the
-stillness of the hot afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet
-as a whole was that of a vast masculine town, for not a woman could be
-descried anywhere. It was striking and mournful. When we had got to the
-end of the fleet I had a wild idea:
-
-“Let us go up the Stour.”
-
-At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and
-pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever
-had been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a
-ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded.
-Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had
-quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were
-back in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills,
-that was all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small
-headlands, and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated
-that a channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys
-nobody could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no
-buoys, and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide,
-deceptive waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put
-about, we dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant
-fleet, in another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of
-the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached
-mysteriously out of one of those bights, and it was maimed by two men
-with the air of conspirators.
-
-“D’ ye want a pilot?”
-
-We hardened ourselves.
-
-“No.”
-
-They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.
-
-“Why in thunder is n’t this river buoyed?” I demanded of the skipper.
-
-The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking
-the bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No
-catastrophe. The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause
-again, reversing the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far
-to port could be seen a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank.
-Impossible that it could indicate the true channel. We went straight
-ahead and chanced it. The next instant we were hard on the mud in
-midstream, and the propeller was making a terrific pother astern. We
-could only wait for the tide to float us off. The rowboat appeared
-again.
-
-‘D’ ye want a pilot?”
-
-“No.”
-
-And it disappeared.
-
-When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:
-
-“Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?”
-
-“We ‘ll go on,” I said. I could say no less.
-
-[Illustration: 0288]
-
-We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel
-was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of
-Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and
-seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never a _Velsa_. And yet the smoke of
-the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay.
-The town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique
-sensation that afternoon.
-
-“Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?” said the skipper, adding with a
-grin, “There’s only about half an hour left of the flood, and if we get
-aground again----”
-
-It was another challenge.
-
-“Yes,” I said.
-
-Manningtree is a town even more recondite than Mistley, and it marks the
-very end of the navigable waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the
-next corner. We thought we could detect the channel, curving out again
-now into midstream. We followed the lure, opened out Manningtree the
-desired--and went on the mud with a most perceptible bump. Out, quick,
-with the dinghy! Cover her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and
-lower an anchor therein and about fifty fathoms of chain, and row away!
-We manned the windlass, and dragged the _Velsa_ off the mud.
-
-“Shall we go on, sir?”
-
-“No,” I said, not a hero. “We ‘ll give up Manningtree this trip.”
- Obstinacy in adventure might have meant twelve hours in the mud. The
-crew breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to civilization.
-We knew now why the Stour is a desolate stream. Thus to this day I have
-never reached Manningtree except in an automobile.
-
-And there are still stranger waters than the Stour; for example, Hamford
-Water, where explosives are manufactured on lonely marshes, where
-immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks and owls intermingle, and
-public-houses with no public linger on from century to century, and
-where the saltings are greener than anywhere else on the coast, and the
-east wind more east, and the mud more vivid. And the _Velsa_ has been
-there, too.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVIII--IN SUFFOLK
-
-THE Orwell is reputed to have the finest estuary in East Anglia. It
-is a broad stream, and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines
-of destruction have been left behind, it begins to be humane and
-reassuring. Thanks to the surprising modernity of the town of Ipswich,
-which has discovered that there are interests more important than those
-of local pilots, it is thoroughly well buoyed, so that the stranger and
-the amateur cannot fail to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself
-into Suffolk in soft and civilized curves, and displays no wildness
-of any kind and, except at one point, very little mud. When you are
-navigating the Orwell, you know positively that you are in England.
-On each side of you modest but gracefully wooded hills slope down with
-caution to the bank, and you have glimpses of magnificent mansions set
-in the midst of vast, undulating parks, crisscrossed with perfectly
-graveled paths that gleam in the sunshine. Everything here is private
-and sacred, and at the gates of the park lodge-keepers guard not only
-the paradisiacal acres, but the original ideas that brought the estate
-into existence.
-
-Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes with calm confidence in
-itself; and even on your yacht’s deck you can feel it, and you are awed.
-For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous cohesive force. And
-it is a solemn thought that within a mile of you may be a hushed
-drawingroom at whose doors the notion of democracy has been knocking
-quite in vain for a hundred years. Presently you will hear the sweet and
-solemn chimes of a tower-clock, sound which seems to spread peace and
-somnolence over half a county. And as you listen, you cannot but be
-convinced that the feudal world is august and beautiful, and that it
-cannot be improved, and that to overthrow it would be a vandalism. That
-is the estuary of the Orwell and its influence. Your pleasure in it will
-be unalloyed unless you are so ill-advised as to pull off in the dinghy,
-and try to land in one of the lovely demesnes.
-
-About half-way up the estuary, just after passing several big
-three-masters moored in midstream and unloading into lighters, you come
-to Pinmill, renowned among yachtsmen and among painters. Its haven is
-formed out of the angle of a bend in the river, and the narrowness of
-the channel at this point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to
-the yachts at anchor. Here are all manner of yachts, and you are fairly
-certain to see a friend, and pay or receive a visit of state. And also
-very probably, if you are on board the Velsa some painter on another
-yacht will feel bound to put your strange craft into a sketch. And the
-skipper, who has little partiality for these river scenes, will take the
-opportunity to go somewhere else on a bicycle. You, too, must go
-ashore, because Pinmill is an exhibition-village, entirely picturesque,
-paintable, and English. It is liable to send the foreigner into
-raptures, and Americans have been known to assert that they could exist
-there in happiness forever and ever.
-
-I believe that some person or persons in authority offer prizes to the
-peasantry for the prettiest cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but
-I should like to see in every picturesque and paint-able English village
-a placard stating the number of happy peasants who sleep more than three
-in a room, and the number of adult able-bodied males who earn less than
-threepence an hour. All aspects of the admirable feudal system ought to
-be made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-clock speak loud,
-and need no advertisement; cottage gardens also insist on the traveler’s
-attention, but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.
-
-[Illustration: 0297]
-
-The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually decide to remain there
-over night. In one respect this is a mistake, for the company of yachts
-is such that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck attract an
-audience, which produces self-consciousness in the exerciser.
-
-Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and Ipswich is a genuine town
-that combines industrialism with the historic sense. No American
-can afford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a notorious
-connection with Mr. Pickwick, and was reproduced entire a lifelike-size at
-a world’s fair in the United States. Aware of this important fact,
-the second-hand furniture and curio-dealers of the town have adopted
-suitable measures. When they have finished collecting, Americans should
-go to the docks--as interesting as anything in Ipswich--and see the
-old custom-house, with its arch, and the gloriously romantic French
-and Scandinavian three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the
-principal basin. Times change. Less than eighty years ago the docks of
-Ipswich were larger than those of London. And there are men alive and
-fighting in Ipswich to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich
-shall resume something of her ancient position in the world.
-
-Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the
-estuary of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little
-ocean air after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there
-from to the North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which
-is at the mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined
-to risk the entrance. According to all printed advice, the entrance
-ought not to be risked without local aid. There is a bank at the mouth,
-with a patch that dries at low water, and within there is another bank.
-The shoals shift pretty frequently, and, worst of all, the tide runs
-at the rate of six knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and the
-flood only two hours old. We followed the sailing directions, and got in
-without trouble just as night fell. The rip of the tide was very marked,
-and the coast-guard who boarded us with a coast-guard’s usual curiosity
-looked at us as though we were either heroes or rash fools, probably the
-latter.
-
-We dropped anchor for the night, and the next morning explored the
-estuary, with the tide rising. We soon decided that the perils of this
-famous river had been exaggerated. There were plenty of beacons,--which,
-by the way, are continually being shifted as the shoals shift,--and
-moreover the channel defined itself quite simply, for the reason
-that the rest of the winding river-bed was dry. We arrived proudly at
-Woodbridge, drawing all the maritime part of the town to look at us, and
-we ourselves looked at Woodbridge in a fitting manner, for it is sacred
-to the memory not of Omar Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward
-Fitzgerald, who well knew the idiosyncrasies of the Deben. Then it was
-necessary for us to return, as only for about two hours at each tide is
-there sufficient water for a yacht to lie at Woodbridge.
-
-The exit from the Deben was a different affair from the incoming.
-Instead of a clearly defined channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The
-beacons or perches were still poking up their heads, of course, but they
-were of no use, since they had nothing to indicate whether they were
-starboard or port beacons. It is such details that harmonize well with
-the Old-World air of English estuaries--with the swans, for instance,
-those eighteenth-century birds that abound on the Deben. We had to
-take our choice of port or starboard. Heaven guided us. We reached the
-entrance. The tide was at half-ebb and running like a race; the weather
-was unreliable. It was folly to proceed. We proceeded. We had got in
-alone; we would get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who bawled
-after us. We put the two beacons in a line astern, obedient to the
-sailing directions; but we could not keep them in a line. The tide
-swirled us away, making naught of the engine. We gave a tremendous
-bump. Yes, we were assuredly on the bank for at least ten hours, if not
-forever; if it came on to blow, we might well be wrecked. But no. The
-ancient _Velsa_ seemed to rebound elastically off the traitorous sand,
-and we were afloat again, In two minutes more we were safe. What the
-coastguard said is not known to this day. We felt secretly ashamed of
-our foolishness, but we were sustained by the satisfaction of having
-deprived more local pilots of their fees.
-
-Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the next river-mouth
-northward--Orford Haven--we yielded to a base common sense, and signaled
-for a pilot. The river Ore is more dangerous to enter, and far more
-peculiar even than the Deben. The desolate spot, where it runs into the
-sea is well called Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shingles.
-The tide runs very fast indeed; the bar shifts after every gale, and not
-more than four feet of water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the
-bottom is hard. It was probably the hardness of the bottom that finally
-induced us to stoop to a pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to
-run aground on anything of a rocky nature may be fatal. Our signal was
-simply ignored. Not the slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We
-were creeping in, and we continued to creep in. The skipper sent the
-deck-hand forward with the pole. He called out seven feet, eight feet,
-seven feet; but these were Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, because
-the pole is a Dutch pole. The water was ominous, full of curling crests
-and unpleasant hollows, as the wind fought the current. The deckhand
-called out seven, six, five and a half. We could almost feel the ship
-bump... and then we were over the bar. Needless to say that a pilot
-immediately hove in sight. We waved him off, though he was an old man
-with a grievance.
-
-We approached the narrows. We had conquered the worst difficulties by
-the sole help of the skipper’s instinct for a channel, for the beacons
-were incomprehensible to us; and we imagined that we could get through
-the narrows into the river proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair
-wind, and we set all sails, and the engine was working well; but there
-was more than a six-knot tide rushing out through those narrows, and
-we could not get through. We hung in them for about half an hour. Then,
-imitating the example of a fisherman who had followed us, we just ran
-her nose into the shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped ashore
-with a rope. The opportunity to paint a water-color of the _Velsa_
-under full sail was not to be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed
-knowledge from the fisherman. He informed us that we had not entered by
-the channel at all; that we were never anywhere near it. He said that
-the channel had four feet at that hour. Thus we learned that local
-wisdom is not always omniscience.
-
-After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore on the slack. The Ore is
-a very dull river, but it has the pleasing singularity of refusing to
-quit the ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel with the
-North Sea, separated from it only by a narrow strip of shingle. Under
-another name it all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh where at length
-it curves inland. On its banks is Orford, a town more dead than any
-dead city of the Zuyder Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of
-character. The deadness of Orford may be estimated from the fact that
-it can support a kinematograph only three nights a week. It has electric
-light, but no railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty castle,
-a fine church, an antique quay, and a large supply of splendid lobsters.
-It knows not the tourist, and has the air of a natural self-preserving
-museum.
-
-[Illustration: 0308]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIX--THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
-
-TIME was when I agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict
-that the Orwell is the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I
-know it better, I unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is
-a nobler stream, a true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its
-banks wilder, and its atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of
-it is that it does not gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the
-Blackwater is September, when the village regattas take place, and the
-sunrises over leagues of marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.
-
-Last September the _Velsa_ came early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea
-Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is
-sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island--which is an island only
-during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their home
-in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley
-of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to
-fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real
-barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons
-or so, fully “dressed,” and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys,
-to preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but
-the intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and
-scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long
-lane of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide
-to cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive
-band which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
-
-We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the
-trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose,
-and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a
-visit--one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their
-own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor
-before the mast or like a longshore loafer--and told us a tale of an
-amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all
-her life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her,
-he lost his nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a
-fisherman at anchor in a dinghy, “Which is the channel?” The fisherman,
-seeing a yacht whose lines had been familiar to him for twenty years,
-imagined that he was being made fun of. He drawled out, “_You_ know.” In
-response to appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out,
-“_You_ know.” At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he
-drawlingly advised: “Let the old wench alone. Let her alone. _She_ ’ll
-find her way in all right.” Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal
-stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water
-rises. There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the
-dead of night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned
-round to face the coast-guardsman. “Look here,” said he to the
-coast-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any
-further. _You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers
-nowadays_.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of
-this dark st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not
-come any further. _You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the
-newspapers nowadays_.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the
-truth of this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.
-
-The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently
-the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with
-white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the
-lane of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given
-moment in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy
-events are finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in
-the long races have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the
-Quarters, and proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames
-barges lie, and past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide
-was still slack. We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the
-Blackwater, and we anchored a few miles below that municipal survival,
-in the wildest part of the river, and watched the sun disappear over
-vast, flat expanses of water as smooth as oil, with low banks whose
-distances were enormously enhanced by the customary optical delusions of
-English weather. Close to us was Osea Island, where an establishment for
-the reformation of drunkards adds to the weird scene an artistic touch
-of the sinister. From the private jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in
-process of being reformed gazed at us steadily in the deepening gloom.
-Then an attendant came down the jetty and lighted its solitary red eye,
-which joined its stare to that of the inebriates.
-
-[Illustration: 0313]
-
-Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the
-pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it,
-is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not
-have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway
-service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of
-yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle
-affords esthetic pleasure.
-
-There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the
-Chelmsford Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and
-lock-house steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond
-the lock was a basin in which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian
-schooners discharging timber and all the romance of the North. The
-prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage on the canal, at any
-rate as far as the next lock, and we asked the lock-keeper how far off
-the next lock was. He said curtly:
-
-“Ye can’t go up to the next lock.”
-
-“Why not?”
-
-“Because there’s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was
-any more.”
-
-We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a
-county town, having a depth of only two feet.
-
-He sharply defended his canal.
-
-“Well,” he ended caustically, “it’s been going on now for a hundred or
-a hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day
-or two.”
-
-We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we
-apologized..
-
-Later--it was a Sunday of glorious weather--we rowed in the dinghy
-through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of Maldon
-was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were flitting
-about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open
-sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being
-Sunday and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place
-was naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but
-there was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to
-be bored, the ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its
-church-topped hill.
-
-Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and
-eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger’s residence all complete, as
-in the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty
-of barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and
-indefatigable. I have not yet visited in the _Velsa_ any Continental
-port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian
-estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was
-at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie
-in wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind.
-Assuredly a Thames barge--said to be the largest craft in the world
-sailed by a man and a boy--in full course on the Blackwater is a
-noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of
-enterprise in transport.
-
-The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company
-with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The
-distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the
-atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl
-were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was
-not flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The
-unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two
-thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have
-stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a
-sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.
-
-At seven o’clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving
-water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the
-mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely
-moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old
-white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.
-
-“Is this creek long?” I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek
-with the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they
-had never seen it before.
-
-“Aye, it’s long.”
-
-“How long is it? Is it a mile?”
-
-“Aye, it’s a mile.”
-
-“Is there anything up there?” Another pause. The boat was drawing away
-from me.
-
-“Aye, there’s oysters up there.” The boat and the men withdrew
-imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below,
-at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village
-regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme
-beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last
-cruise, of the season.
-
-[Illustration: 0320]
-
-
-THE END
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett
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