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.