I blinked in the blaze of sunlight which tore open the green veil of dusk, and the air, though tingling with ozone, felt hot after the depths of the forest.
Not a flower, not a garden was to be seen, yet Scheveningen was a flower-garden of color in itself. Where the color came from you could scarcely say, yet it struck at your eyes from all directions. Flags flamed, roofs were red as beds of geraniums; or else they were green, or else they were vivid yellow. The hotels were of quaint design, with a suggestion of the Oriental; the shops had covered galleries, and the people moving in the big, circular place into which we drove—the place of the Kurhaus and of the circus—were drifting particles of the bright mosaic; tall, dark young officers (not at all typically Dutch according to preconceived ideas) in green and crimson or bright blue uniforms; pretty girls in white with rose-trimmed or scarlet hats; nursemaids in the costume of some remote province, the sunlight setting their gold head-ornaments on fire; tiny children in blue sailor-suits, or with a little red fez on a yellow head; old, white-haired gentlemen holding on unsuitable top-hats as they walked against the wind; white-aproned waiters flitting about restaurant verandas, carrying pink ices, or baskets of fruit, like jewels.
It was a gay scene, but Robert said it was nothing to the "high season," which began on the first of August, and brought throngs of fashionable people from all over Europe. As for the top-hats at which I laughed, he defended them stoutly, saying they were as much de rigueur at The Hague as in London, and he could see nothing comic in wearing them at the seaside.
Still we had had no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the fashionable center of Scheveningen.
In the center, the Kurhaus dominated all; hotel, restaurant, concert-room, theater, in one. Terrace below terrace it descended and sent out into the green water of the North Sea a great pier blossoming with flags. But the most individual feature was the large and enterprising family of "wind stoels"—dear, cozy basket-houses for one, like green and yellow bee-hives cut in half, or giant sunbonnets crowding the beach behind the bathing-machines. There one could nestle, self-contained as a hermit-crab in a shell, defying east wind or baking sun, happy with a book, or the person one liked best in a twin wind-stoel opposite.
Reposeful gaiety seemed at this first glance to be the note struck by Scheveningen, and the air was buoyant as I had never known air to be before.
"If you visit us in August," said Robert, "you will hear the best operas, see the best automobile races, the most exciting motor-boat races——"
"But we shall be on our own motor-boat in August," said I.
"I do not think so. You will perhaps let your boat. We will talk to my mother," Robert answered, as one soothes a fractious child. Then, before I had breath to answer, he swept us away from the beach, and drew up before an aggressively comfortable villa on a terrace opening to the sea.