“But here, here!” I called. “This won’t do. You must be sensible. What sort of a hotel do you keep here, anyhow? I must have forty gulden—thirty, anyhow. My letter of credit is good. Examine it. Good heavens! You have at least eight hundred gulden worth of luggage there.”
He had turned and was surveying me again. “It can’t be done,” he said.
“Impossible!” I cried. “I must have it. Why, I haven’t a cent. You must trust me until to-morrow morning.”
“Give him twenty gulden,” he said to the clerk, wearily, and turned away.
“Good Heavens!” I said to the clerk, “give me the twenty gulden before I die of rage.” And so he counted them out to me and I went in to breakfast.
I was charmed to find that the room overlooked one of the lovely canals with a distant view of others—all of them alive with canal-boats poled along slowly by solid, placid Hollanders, the spring sunlight giving them a warm, alluring, mildly adventurous aspect. The sense of light on water was so delightful from the breakfast-room, a great airy place, that it gave an added flavor to my Sunday morning breakfast of eggs and bacon. I was so pleased with my general surroundings here that I even hummed a tune while I ate.
CHAPTER L
AMSTERDAM
Amsterdam I should certainly include among my cities of light and charm, a place to live in. Not that it has, in my judgment, any of that capital significance of Paris or Rome or Venice. Though greater by a hundred thousand in population than Frankfort, it has not even the forceful commercial texture of that place. The spirit of the city seemed so much more unbusinesslike,—so much slower and easier-going. Before I sent forth a single letter of introduction I spent an entire day idling about its so often semicircular streets, following the canals which thread their centers like made pools, rejoicing in the cool brick walks which line the sides, looking at the reflection of houses and buildings in the ever-present water.
Holland is obviously a land of canals and windmills, but much more than that it is a land of atmosphere. I have often speculated as to just what it is that the sea does to its children that marks them so definitely for its own. And here in Amsterdam the thought came to me again. It is this: Your waterside idler, whether he traverses the wide stretches of the ocean or remains at home near the sea, has a seeming vacuity or dreaminess of soul that no rush of ordinary life can disturb. I have noted it of every port of the sea, that the eager intensity of men so often melts away at the water’s edge. Boats are not loaded with the hard realism that marks the lading of trains. A sense of the idle-devil-may-care indifference of water seems to play about the affairs of these people, of those who have to do with them—the unhastening indifference of the sea. Perhaps the suggestion of the soundless, timeless, heartless deep that is in every channel, inlet, sluice, and dock-basin is the element that is at the base of their lagging motions. Your sailor and seafaring man will not hurry. His eyes are wide with a strange suspicion of the deep. He knows by contact what the subtlety and the fury of the waters are. The word of the sea is to be indifferent. “Never you mind, dearie. As it was in the beginning, so it ever shall be.”