We were still looking at the flowers when the pastor found us, and carried us home to the Pastorie to tea. Tea in handleless cups, brought from China, long before the ports were open to any but the sturdy old Dutch traders, and handed down from mother to daughter without written bequest, but inalienable as an English coronet. The maid-servant, I remember, brought in her cup, not a little handleless one, but a good substantial young basin, and her mistress filled it from the pot when we had all been served. She was a rosy-cheeked bare-armed maid, close relation, one might think, to Miss Matty’s invaluable Martha, or, in appearance, to Peggotty of greater fame. Like Martha in her taste for the lads, so her mistress said—a perhaps excusable fault, seeing that many of the water-going profession—a class notoriously adept at love-making—were always coming and going to the otherwise quiet little village. Like Martha, too, she was in her unabashed interest in strangers. It was the most wide-eyed attention she bestowed on me, and with the most obvious reluctance that she left the room, with me in it, when she had got her tea.
AZALEAS, HET LOO
It was rather a dark little room, though it had two windows; one, decorously veiled by hand-netted curtains, looking on to the cheeriness of the village street; and one on to the small garden, where samples of all the choice bulbs from the great grower in Haarlem were set, and usually failed to bloom, for the pastor, unlike his brother, was a poor gardener. On the other side of the passage was another room, the pastor’s study it may have been called. There were no deep-seated leather chairs there—the chairs were mostly wood, and not inviting to repose; nor any richly sombre rows of leather-bound books, there were only three books, a Bible and two others, and they were shabbily bound. Rather a bare room, the white scrubbed floor quite carpetless, except for a very small island of mat, which modestly hid itself under the table. The folk who came to see the pastor on questions of mutual dispute or individual difficulty, or any other of the hundred troubles of common humanity, would seem to have been many. They were the sort that wear wooden shoes, hard on carpets and great carriers of dirt, the wife said, and she, no doubt, thought they would be happier if they had not to keep such things in mind—as her husband certainly was. He was most at home, good man, dispensing the wisdom of comfort in his carpetless room, with his Bible and tobacco lying together on the deal table, and the smoke of his pipe and his guests’ curling to the sunny yellow-washed walls. The big window of this room looked out on to the quay, and from it the pastor could nod greeting to half his parishioners of a morning, and see, if he knew how to look, a good deal of their doings. Even while we stood there that day, one of us very conscious of the quiet brightness, the simple saintliness of the place, the captain of our lately left boat came up on the deck of his little vessel. He came to greet a girl—the fourth he had kissed, with the well-received amorousness of at least betrothed rights, in my short acquaintance with him. But the pastor did not know that, it was not the sort of thing he knew. He knew how the captain had carried Johan Vorst’s bulbs to Haarlem free that year, when the poor fellow lost so much in the floods; how he brought the widow’s firing every winter, and how he gave a job to Crooked Jan when he came back from prison, and no one else (but the pastor) would give him a helping hand. These were the things the pastor always knew—Blessings on the folk who always know the best of us, and expect it, too!
But this is not concerning Dutch bulb fields, it has floated rather far from the subject, like the little canal boat. Yet in a way it concerns them, for to appreciate the flowers, and not only to see them as so many streaks of colour or so many acres of blossoming roots, it is perhaps well to know something of the life and ways of the people who grow them—a people who have been the greatest gardeners, and some of the greatest sea-carriers and collectors of the world for 400 years; who, with much that is new, have kept a good deal that is old, and who are perhaps less like what we are than what we used to be.
CHAPTER II
CROCUS AND EARLY SPRING FLOWERS
Winter in the bulb country is not a very attractive time, at least to the foreigner. The same possibly may be said of winter in England, though few healthy Englishmen, unless tied very tightly to town, admit it. Winter in Holland is long, and, more often than not, very cold. The canals are often frozen for a considerable time, when the easiest way to get about in the country districts is on skates. Nearly all Dutchmen are at home on skates; comparatively few are clever oarsmen, though one might have thought they had equal opportunities. The reason probably is, that one can go upon one’s work or business on skates, and save rather than lose time thereby; whereas, in the average man’s circumstances, one can only row for recreation. In England, of course, such a reason would not operate; and, given the Dutch facilities, one can imagine that as many good sportsmen would assemble to watch inter-county contests on the frozen or liquid water (according to season) as now enthusiastically look on at cricket or football matches. Certainly there are very marked differences between the nations.
THE RETURN OF THE STORKS