Chapter XVII
Groningen to Zutphen
Fresh tea—Dutch meals—The Doelens—Groningen—Roman Catholic priests—The boys’ penance—Luther and Erasmus—The peat country—Folk lore—Terburg—Thomas à Kempis—Zwolle—The wild girl—Kampen—A hall of justice indeed—An ideal holiday-place—The wiseacres—Urk—Sir Philip Sidney—Zutphen—The scripture class—The wax works—Dutch public morality.
I remember the Doelen at Groningen for several reasons, all of them thoroughly material. (Holland is, however, a material country.) First I would put the very sensible custom of providing every guest who has ordered tea for breakfast with a little tea caddy. At the foot of the table is a boiling urn from which one fills one’s teapot, and is thus assured of tea that is fresh. So simple and reasonable a habit ought to be the rule rather than the exception: but never have I found it elsewhere. This surely is civilisation, I said.
The Doelen was also the only inn in Holland where an inclusive bottle of claret was placed before me on the table; and it was the only inn where I had the opportunity of eating ptarmigan with stewed apricots—a very happy alliance.
Good however as was the Groningen dinner, it was a Sunday dinner at the Leeuwarden Doelen which remains in my memory. This also is a friendly unspoiled northern inn, where the bill of fare is arranged with a nice thought Page 251to the requirements of the Free Frisian. I kept no note of the meal, but I recollect the occurrence at one stage of plovers’ eggs (which the Dutch eat hot, dropping them into cold water for an instant to ensure the easy removal of the shell), and at another, some time later, of duckling with prunes.
The popularity of the name Doelen as a Dutch sign might have a word of explanation. Doelen means target, or shooting saloon; and shooting at the mark was a very common and useful recreation with the Dutch in the sixteenth century. At first the shooting clubs met only to shoot—as in the case of the arquebusiers in Rembrandt’s “[Night Watch],” who are painted leaving their Doelen; later they became more social and the accessories of sociability were added; and after a while the accessories of sociability crowded out the shooting altogether, and nothing but an inn with the name Doelen remained of what began as a rifle gallery.
At Groningen, which is a large prosperous town, and the birthplace both of Joseph Israels and H.W. Mesdag, cheese and dairy produce are left behind. We are now in the grain country. Groningen is larger than Leeuwarden—it has nearly seventy thousand inhabitants—and its evening light seemed to me even more beautifully liquid. I sat for a long time in a cafe overlooking the great square, feeding a very greedy and impertinent terrier, and alternately watching an endless game of billiards and the changing hue of the sky as day turned to night and the clean white stars came out. In Holland one can sit very long in cafes: I had dined and left a table of forty Dutchmen just settling down to their wine, at six o’clock, with the whole evening before me.
Groningen takes very good care of itself. It has trams, Page 252excellent shops and buildings, a crowded inland harbour, and a spreading park where once were its fortifications. The mounds in this park were the first hills I had seen since Laren. The church in the market square is immense, with a high tower of bells that kept me awake, but had none of the soothing charm of Long John at Middelburg, whose praises it will soon be my privilege to sound. The only rich thing in the whitewashed vastnesses of the church is the organ, built more than four hundred years ago by Rudolph Agricola of this province. I did not hear it.