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.