Three days later I took passage for London and on the afternoon following my arrival embarked at Gravesend on the Batavien II, bound for Rotterdam. The steerage fare was five shillings; in view of the accommodations, an extravagant price. My only companions amid the chaos of so-called mattresses strewn about the hold were a German Hufschmied and his bedraggled spouse, joint possessors of a bundle of rags containing a most distressingly powerful pair of lungs. The odor of the mattresses and the stench from the bundle turned the night into a walking nightmare, which I spent in congratulating myself that the voyage was to be of short duration.
I climbed on deck at sunrise to find the ship steaming at half speed through a placid canal. Far down below us were clusters of squat cottages, the white smoke of kindling fires curling slowly upward from their chimneys. Here and there a peasant, looking quite tiny from the height of our deck, crawled along across the flat meadows. Away in the distance several stocky windmills were turning slowly yet ceaselessly in the morning breeze.
The canal opened out into the teeming harbor of Rotterdam. A custom’s officer inquired my profession, slapped me paternally on the back with a warning in German to beware the “schlechte Leute” who lay in wait for seamen ashore, and dismissed me, while the well-dressed tourist still fumed over the uninspected luggage in his cabin.
I quickly tired of the confines of the city and turned out along the flat highway to Delft. The route skirted a great canal; at intervals it crossed branch waterways, all half-hidden by cumbersome cargo-boats. Heavily laden boats toiled slowly by on their way to market, empty boats glided easily homeward. On board, stocky men, bowed double over heavy pike-poles, marched laboriously from bow to stern. Along the graveled tow-paths that checkered the flat landscape, buxom women strained like over-burdened oxen at the tow-ropes about their shoulders. Wherever one met him the boating Dutchman shared most fairly with his wife the labor of propelling his unwieldy craft, except that the wife walked and the Dutchman rode.
In the early afternoon I briefly visited Delft, and pushed on towards the Hague. No wayfarer, obviously, could in a single day become accustomed to the national clatter of wooden shoes. Beyond Delft I turned into a narrow roadway paved in cobblestones and flanked by two canals. It was a quiet route even for Holland. In serene contentment I pursued my lonely way, gazing off across the unbroken landscape. Suddenly a galloping “rat-a-tat” sounded close behind me. What else but a runaway horse could produce such a devil’s tattoo? To pause and glance behind might cost me my life, for the frenzied brute was almost upon me. With a swiftness born of fear I took to my heels. A few yards beyond was a luckily-placed foot-bridge over one of the canals. I made a flying leap at the structure and gained it in safety, just as there dashed by me at full speed—a Hollander of some six summers, bound to market with a basket on his arm!
“S-Gravenhage,” as the Dutchman calls his capital, was a city teeming with interest; but Holland was one of those countries which I purposed to “do” in orthodox tourist fashion and, after a few short hours in the royal borough, I sought out the highway to Leiden. My seeking was not particularly successful. The mongrel commixture of German, English, and pantomime in which I carried on conversation with the natives was a delectable language, but it did not always gain me lucid directions. Sharply prosecuted inquiries brought me to a road to Leiden, right enough, but it was not the public highway. Thanks to some misconstruction of the native dactylology, I set out for the stamping ground of Rembrandt along the old royal driveway.
It was a pleasure, of course, to travel by the Queen’s own promenade, especially as it led through a fragrant forest park. Unfortunately, a royal demesne is no place in which to find an inn when hunger and darkness come on. This one had not even a cross-road to lead me back to the main highway, and I plodded on into the night amid unbroken solitude. Just what hour it was when I reached Leiden I know not. Beyond question it was late, for the good people, and even the bad, except a few drowsy policemen, were sound asleep; and with a painful number of miles in my legs I went to bed on a pile of lumber.
The warming sun rose none too early, though long before the first shopkeeper. Still fasting I set off towards Haarlem. On these flat lowlands this Sabbath day was oppressively hot. Yet how dolorously devout appeared the peasants who plodded for miles along the dusty highway to the village church! The men, those same men so comfortably picturesque in their work-a-day clothes, marched in their cumbersome Sunday garments like converts doing penance for their sins. The women, buxom always, but painfully awkward in stiffly starched gowns, tramped swelteringly behind the males. Even the children, the rollicking youngsters of the day before, were imprisoned in homemade straight-jackets and suffered martyrdom in uncomplaining silence. But one and all had a cheery word for the passerby and never that sour look which one “on the road” encounters on British highways.
Often, since leaving Rotterdam, I had wondered at the absence of wells in the rural districts. Surely these peasants’ cottages were not connected by water-mains! Pondering the question, I had thus far quenched my thirst only in the villages. But towards noon on this hot Sunday an imperative call for water drove me to turn in at an isolated cottage. Beside the road ran the omnipresent canal. A narrow foot-bridge crossed it to the gate before the dwelling, around which flowed a branch of the main waterway, giving a mooring for the peasant’s canal-boat. The gate proved impregnable and it required much shouting to attract the attention of the householder. At last, from around a corner of the building, a Vrouw of the most buxom type hove into view and bore down upon me as an ocean liner sails into a calm harbor. My knowledge of Dutch being nil, I followed my usual method of coining a language by a process of elimination. Perhaps the lady spoke some German.
“Ein Glas Wasser, bitte.”