The Royal Palace, Amsterdam, facing upon the Dam which is the axis about which the whole city revolves
Once I had the misfortune to be stopping in Amsterdam upon the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, the 31st of August. This not being sufficient unpremeditated self-punishment, I was provincial enough to have chosen as headquarters what appeared from across the street to be a clean, quiet little hotel in the Kalverstraat. The two blended most harmoniously. Between the unmelodious patriots who paraded the Kalverstraat from sunset to sunrise, and the battles royal participated in with the ambidextrous entomological specimens among the bedclothes, I did anything but enjoy a refreshing night’s rest. To which tale there are two morals: avoid Amsterdam on the Queen’s birthday, and little Juliana’s as well, and eschew the hotels in the Kalverstraat (one especially, which shall be nameless) as you would the nest of the subtle hornet.
At the southeastern terminus of the Kalverstraat stands the old Mint Tower of 1620, and still farther to the east is the Rembrandtplein, a small, park-centered intersection of streets named in honor of Holland’s painter par excellence, who lived for sixteen years at No. 4 Joden-Breestraat in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, the house having been since marked with a small memorial tablet.
Here bordering the Rembrandtplein are the larger sidewalk cafés, jammed of a summer’s evening with pleasure-seeking Amsterdamers, each with a cup or a glass of something in front of him. Like those found in the ordinary German cafés these crowds seldom change. Here you may find the same people at eleven that you have seen at seven, and in exactly the same positions. A cup of coffee followed by a cordial is the usual evening’s refreshment programme, the consuming time of which the Amsterdamer will expand into a couple of hours by the assiduous perusal of every newspaper and periodical he can inveigle the waiter to bring him, interrupted only by an occasional sip of his beverage. Even the persistent street singers, who come one at a time to prolong the agony and stand but a few feet away from his table, yelling triumphantly into his ear, fail to disturb him in the least. If, unthinkingly, he finishes his refreshment before he considers the time has arrived to go home to bed, he will calmly smoke out the remainder of the engagement. The expenditure of half a gulden or less will buy his contentment until the following evening.
Many of the indoor cafés charge a small admission fee for the privilege of listening to a “lady orchestra.” In each of these that part which is adjacent to the street will be partitioned off by a dark curtain, so that the patrons of the place may choose, if there be any choice, between the crowds on the street and the vaudeville turns that may be scheduled to follow the sufferings of the musicians.
On the Rembrandtplein stands also the Rembrandt theater, Amsterdam’s principal playhouse, which, by way of information, is closed in summer. But, by way of further information, there are in the city a number of vaudeville theaters that cater to the less exacting in the matter of histrionic art and are open throughout the year, offering more or less respectable performances.
To one of these near the Rembrandtplein I wended my way upon a certain evening, desirous of being amused, no matter what the consequences. I obtained my money’s worth, and more. It cost me one and a half gulden to get in, and it might have cost me an ear, or other projecting appendage, to get out if I had not slipped through a side exit as inconspicuously as I could during the height of the mêlée and commenced forthwith to accelerate my gait toward the hotel. I think the disturbance was inaugurated by an American protégé of His Pugilistic Highness, John Johnson, but I did not consider it exactly safe at the time to tarry longer in order to ascertain definitely.
It so happened that this particular vaudeville house was in the habit of concluding its performance each evening with a series of international wrestling matches, offering a considerable monetary reward to the winner of the finals. The first bout of the evening of my visit was between an Englishman and a Dutchman, which terminated satisfactorily for the latter and with no casualties. The crowd went rampant; whereupon I became imbued with the spirit of the thing, ordered another cup of coffee—which, by the way, was served gratis by the management—and settled myself more comfortably to enjoy the next tilt between a Frenchman and a Swede. The gougings and hair-pullings resorted to by the Latin were not received with complacency on the part of the audience, and when he lost the match, he made his exit with ruffled temper, together with his full share of hisses and catcalls. Then the promoters of the scheme made a managerial mistake. They pitted a bloated Belgian wrestler against the champion of Amsterdam. A brief reference to the pages of any volume reciting the incidents of 1830–31 will convey the correct impression that the Belgians and the Dutch are not the intimate playmates they used to be—a fact which in itself precluded the possibility of any amicable settlement of the forthcoming athletic imbroglio.
The Belgian proved to be a past master in the science of hair-pulling and eye-gouging. When the even tempered Dutchman finally turned him on his back he felt called upon to challenge the referee, the score keeper, the orchestra, the audience, or any other single individual or group of them that happened to be within reach. The crowd hooted the villain and applauded the hero.