My predilection for Amsterdam, our metropolis, does not make me blind to her faults. Among these I would mention first her complete inability to serve as the scene of things romantic. One finds here no masked Dominos on the street, the common people are everywhere open to inspection, no Ghetto, no Templebar, no Chinese quarter, no mysterious courtyard. Whoever commits murder is hanged; and the girls are called “Mietje” and “Jansje”—everything prose.
It requires courage to begin a story in a place ending with “dam.” There it is difficult to have “Emeranties” and “Héloises”; but even these would be of little use, since all of these belles have already been profaned.
How do the French authors manage, though, to dress up their “Margots” and “Marions” as ideals and protect their “Henris” and “Ernestes” from the trite and trivial? These last remind one of M’sieu Henri or M’sieu Erneste just about like our castle embankments remind one of filthy water.
Goethe was a courageous man: Gretchen, Klärchen——
But I, in the Hartenstraat!
However, I am not writing a romance; and even if I should write one, I don’t see why I shouldn’t publish it as a true story. For it is a true story, the story of one who in his youth was in love with a sawmill and had to endure this torture for a long time.
For love is torture, even if it is only love for a sawmill.
It will be seen that the story is going to be quite simple, in fact too frail to stand alone. So here and there I am going to plait something in with the thread of the narrative, just as the Chinaman does with his pigtail when it is too thin. He has no Eau de Lob or oil from Macassar—but I admit that I have never found at Macassar any berries which yielded the required oil.
To begin, in the Hartenstraat was a book-shop and circulating library. A small boy with a city complexion stood on the step and seemed to be unable to open the door. It was evident that he was trying to do something that was beyond his strength.
He stretched out his hand towards the door knob repeatedly, but every time he interrupted this motion either by stopping to pull unnecessarily at a big square-cut collar that rested on his shoulders like a yoke, or by uselessly lifting his hand to screen an ingenuous cough.