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.