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.
