IV
Rotterdam
He who says the romance of the West is dead has never mingled much with the “eight-section man” down in the southwestern corner of Texas. He who avers that the romance of steel is played out and defunct has never straddled an I-beam of a New York skyscraper in the building high above the vortexes of street traffic, above the flirt of a housemaid hanging out clothes on a lower roof. He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam.
They have a pretty park in that San Francisco of Holland that fringes the bank of the Maas. On its river side, near the entrance, there is a café, where, in the evening, the less romantic Rotterdamer basks and imbibes in the throes of a virulent orchestra. Farther along under the trees, past the café and overlooking the river, numerous benches invite the lover of the sea and its ships to sit him down and gaze upon the great steel hulls—and wooden ones, too—that have just returned from, or are about to depart for, a lengthy and uncertain argument with Father Neptune.
The view from here is several times more magnetic than it is from the neighborhood of the café, and so here, about dusk, come those wizened warriors upon whom the sea has cast her spell once and for all time, to sit and smoke their pipes upside down and dream, perhaps, of other days, of other ships, of other seas. Three or four may occupy a single bench, but it will be an hour before a word is passed between them. It is their only method of rejuvenation, and they are loath to be reminded that their day is almost done. A certain sort of reverence pervades the place; it would seem a blasphemy even to speak aloud.
On one of these wooden benches I sat one evening at sunset, looking out across to the docks on the opposite side of the river. Busy little motor boats were sputtering hither and thither between the shipping, bent upon the fulfillment of their last missions of the day. A few hundred yards farther up, a couple of gloomy-looking steam ferries, built like Rhine river tugs, transferred their deck loads of workmen from the different docks and machine shops on the Feijenoord to the Westplein landing in Rotterdam. From out in the stream came the rattle of chain through hawse pipe, as a Portuguese tramp, having entered the harbor too late for a stranger to dock, was preparing an anchorage for the night. Close by lay a Norwegian “wind jammer”—so close that the two of them might easily have rubbed figure-heads. A big cargo boat, bound out, preceded by a tiny tug to herald her approach and followed by its twin to help keep her straight while passing, an exact fit, through the draw to one of the many “havens,” bayed sonorously for the less conspicuous craft to get out of her way; while alongside the Wilhelminakade the upper decks of a great passenger-carrying leviathan, already electric lighted, showed through the rigging of the intermediate vessels. Out of respect for the tide, she was to sail at three the next morning, and her passengers, when they awakened, would find themselves well down the English Channel on their way back to New York after a summer in Europe.
Presently, two young women, pushing a baby-coach between them, came strolling along, and took up positions at the railing just in front of me. Plainly they were English, and, although I strained every nerve to overhear their conversation (which was mean of me), but could not, I divined the reason for their coming. The same thing occurs a dozen times a day in Liverpool, in ’Frisco, in Sydney, in Valparaiso, in every port of any consequence in the world. One was the wife, and the other perhaps the sister, or her sister, or maybe a close friend. And there was also the kiddy.
Their vigil was not long in being rewarded, for during the three weeks’ absence—three months’, more likely, if the voyage had been a long one—they had perused the Lloyd reports daily and diligently, and with the additional aid of a letter or two, had calculated the time of arrival to a nicety.
Soon a great black hull appeared far down the river. Darkness was gathering fast, but they knew the lines of that ship as they knew their little gardens at home. They un-reticuled their handkerchiefs and waved and giggled and giggled and waved. For full twenty minutes they waved and giggled, and then they held the kiddy up. The ship turned off to enter a dock on the opposite side of the stream and, as she turned her port beam to us, someone—it would not have been difficult to guess whom—on her bridge held up a navigator’ s three-foot telescope, it having been doubtless already very much in hand, and waved a brief but significant, “All’s well; see you in two hours”—or waves to that effect.
Yes, there is still romance in shipping, and Rotterdam, being first, last, and all the time a shipping town, there is romance in Rotterdam.
The most satisfactory way of approaching Rotterdam is by water, and the most satisfactory water way is from Dortrecht. By this route you obtain not only the most characteristic views of Rotterdam and the bustle and business about her water front, but you get also the glimpse of Dortrecht that Albert Cuyp availed himself of so often, for the water front of Dortrecht doesn’t seem to have changed much, according to Cuyp, except in the item of steam for sail.