Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea and the yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting. Yachts go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from choice. Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place, because any place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be a wonderful place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you can reconcile yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all, really harmonizes rather well with the mud-flats of the county.
An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go for an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always exciting because you never know when you may be able to return. Even the Velsa, which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle of the fair and wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge, facing each other across the river, both inordinately picturesque, and both given up to the industry of yachting. At Wivenhoe large yachts and even ships are built, and in winter there is always a choice selection of world-famous yachts on the mud, costly and huge gewgaws, with their brass stripped off them, painfully forlorn, stranded in a purgatory between the paradise of last summer and the paradise of the summer to come.
If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches, and as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once more into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow stream, two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them. This is your world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for several miles; and then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great barges against a quay, and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and above the quay rise the towers and steeples of a city that was already ancient when William the Conqueror came to England in the interests of civilization to take up the white man’s burden,—Colchester, where more oysters are eaten on a certain night of the year at a single feast than at any other feast on earth. Such is the boast.
But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on the map of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in confluence with the River Orwell (which truly is in East Anglia) it forms a goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a fairly important naval port, and also “a gate of the empire,” where steamers go forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We came into Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon, with the sea a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the entrance to the Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, the Blake and the Blenheim, each apparently larger than the whole of the town of Harwich. Up the Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was moored a fleet of forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in a quadruple line. It was necessary for the Velsa to review this fleet of astoundingly ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the high satisfaction of the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of Sunday afternoon was thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest. On every sinister ship—the Basilisk, the Harpy, etc., apposite names!—the young bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were trying bravely to amuse themselves. The sound of the jews’-harp and of the concertina was heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles of men squatted here and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing at some game. A few students were reading; some athletes were sparring; many others skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines. Launches and longboats were flitting about full of young men, going on leave to the ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning therefrom. Every sound and noise was clearly distinguishable in the stillness of the hot afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet as a whole was that of a vast masculine town, for not a woman could be descried anywhere. It was striking and mournful. When we had got to the end of the fleet I had a wild idea:
“Let us go up the Stour.”
At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever had been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded. Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were back in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills, that was all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small headlands, and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated that a channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys nobody could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no buoys, and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide, deceptive waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put about, we dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant fleet, in another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached mysteriously out of one of those bights, and it was maimed by two men with the air of conspirators.
“D’ ye want a pilot?”
We hardened ourselves.
“No.”
They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.