Windmills and Wooden Shoes

by Blair Jaekel

And a word here to the wise is sufficient: don’t settle yourself for an all day train ride. Don’t even exert yourself to the extent of hoisting your grip to the baggage rack. If the compartment be crowded—which it never is, going to Middelburg—you might hold your suit case on your lap the entire journey without fatigue or even ennui. Middelburg is four miles from Flushing. If the engineer doesn’t slow down to blow the whistle it will take just eleven minutes to cover the distance.

I have anticipated the fact that the sum total of your baggage will consist of a suit case, because personally conducting a trunk through Holland would be just as incongruous as saddling a Shetland pony with an elephant howdah.

There are two methods of seeing the Island of Walcheren, equally fascinating, and the visitor can avail himself of both in one and the same day. The first is by climbing the two hundred and seventy-odd steps to the top of “Long John” in Middelburg, and the second by a drive around the Island, covering, perhaps, thirty miles, and touching the three principal places of interest: Veere, Domburg, and Westkapelle. To state here that the Island of Walcheren is not an island might seem a bit ambiguous, but it is true, nevertheless, and may be explained away as follows:

Long before our time, perhaps in the distant Paleozoic age, Walcheren was nothing more than shallow water. Along came the Dutch—who have a happy faculty of making their own geography as they need it—and, seeing prospects in its development, built a sort of cofferdam around it, pumped the place dry, and made it into an island. It made a fairly good island, and in later years they grafted it on to the parent land by a long embankment across an arm of the Scheldt, and made it into a peninsula. A peninsula it still remains, but its future is all a matter of conjecture.

“Long John,” or Lang Jan, if the sobriquet be translated into Dutch, is practically the Washington Monument of Walcheren. It is the two-hundred-and-eighty-foot tower of the Nieuwe Kerk in Middelburg, capped with a climax of forty-one bells that chime a quaint fragment of some familiar popular melody every seven-and-a-half minutes. On the hour Long John literally vibrates from foundation to weather vane in a frenzied endeavor to pour forth in toto the accumulation of more or less music administered in small doses during the previous sixty minutes.

It is up the middle of Long John you must climb in a spiral to obtain a first impression of Walcheren. It is a tedious task, and by the time you are halfway up you are blessing the memory of the man who twined the now much worn hand rope along the steep staircase. You may even be about to give up in disgust, when, of a sudden, you stumble in upon the lofty hermitage of old Hendrick Landman, the keeper of the bells.

Hendrick sits serenely in his armchair in an extremely well ventilated room at the top of the spiral and lets people pay a small fee for the privilege of climbing up to have him point out the view and exhibit his mechanical masterpiece a few ladder lengths higher up. Hendrick’s view alone is doubly worth the climb, and, after reimbursing him to the equivalent extent of about eight cents in American coinage, you will also have to admit that he can certainly keep bells. I know nothing of whatever else Hendrick can or cannot do, but he can certainly keep bells; and after all, a man can hope for nothing more than to achieve success in his chosen calling. Hendrick also takes just pride in the condition of the Gargantuan Swiss music box that is responsible for the two or three bars every seven-and-a-half minutes. He oils it and he winds it assiduously twice every day in the year.

Taken by and large, Hendrick is an unimpeachable bell keeper.

After having been duly and visibly impressed with the manner in which Hendrick keeps his bells and his garrulous music box, it might be well to tarry with him for a few moments at the foot of the ladder and attempt a squint or two through the old gentleman’s telescope, which, from the appearance of it, might be a lineal descendant of the first ones ever put together by Zacharias Jansen, all of three hundred years ago and not more than a few feet from the base of the tower you stand upon.

Jansen, the inventor of the telescope and the microscope, and Father Jacob Cats, the humorist-poet-philosopher, were contemporaries in Middelburg for a time, and the town claims them as its two most illustrious sons. The children of Jansen’s genius may still be viewed in the little Museum of the Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Watenschappen (don’t ask me to pronounce the name of that society; it is task enough to spell it correctly) in the Wagenaarstraat of Zeeland’s capital; Father Cats will live in Holland in book form until the end of all things.