From the Log of the Velsa

by Arnold Bennett

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.

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.