FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA

THE skipper, who, in addition to being a yachtsman, is a Dutchman, smiled with calm assurance as we approached the Dutch frontier in the August evening over the populous water of the canal which leads from Ghent to Terneuzen. He could not abide Belgium, possibly because it is rather like Holland in some ways. In his opinion the bureaucrats of Belgium did not understand yachts and the respect due to them, whereas the bureaucrats of Holland did. Holland was pictured for me as a paradise where a yacht with a seventy-foot mast never had to wait a single moment for a bridge to be swung open. When I inquired about custom-house formalities, I learned that a Dutch custom-house did not exist for a craft flying the sacred blue ensign of the British Naval Reserve. And it was so. Merely depositing a ticket and a tip into the long-handled butterfly-net dangled over our deck by the bridge-man as we passed, we sailed straight into Holland, and no word said! But we knew immediately that we were in another country—a country cleaner and neater and more garnished even than Belgium. The Terneuzen Canal, with its brickwork banks and its villages “finished” to the last tile, reminded me of the extravagant, oily perfection of the main tracks of those dandiacal railroads, the North Western in England and the Pennsylvania in America. The stiff sailing breeze was at length favorable. We set the mainsail unexceptionably; and at once, with the falling dusk, the wind fell, and the rain too. We had to depend again on our erratic motor, with all Holland gazing at us. Suddenly the whole canal was lit up on both sides by electricity. We responded with our lights. The exceedingly heavy rain drove me into the saloon to read Dostoyevsky.

At eight P. M. I was dug up out of the depths of Dostoyevsky in order to see my first Dutch harbor. Rain poured through the black night. There was a plashing of invisible wavelets below, utter darkness above, and a few forlorn lights winking at vast distances. I was informed that we were moored in the yacht-basin of Terneuzen. I remained calm. Had we been moored in the yacht-basin of Kamchatka, the smell of dinner would still have been issuing from the forecastle-hatch, the open page of Dostoyevsky would still have invited me through the saloon skylight, and the amiable ray of the saloon lamp would still have glinted on the piano and on the binnacle with impartial affection. Herein lies an advantage of yachting over motoring. I redescended without a regret, without an apprehension. Already the cook was displacing Dostoyevsky in favor of a white table-cloth and cutlery.

The next morning we were at large on the billow’s of the West Schelde, a majestic and enraged stream, of which Flushing is the guardian and Antwerp the mistress. The rain had in no wise lost heart. With a contrary wind and a choppy sea, the yacht had a chance to show her qualities and defects. She has both. Built to the order of a Dutch baron rather less than twenty years ago, she is flat-bottomed, with lee-boards, and follows closely the lines of certain very picturesque Dutch fishing-smacks. She has a length of just over fifty-five feet and a beam of just over fifteen feet. Her tonnage is fifty-one, except when dues have to be paid, on which serious occasions it mysteriously shrinks to twenty-one net. Yachtsmen are always thus modest. Her rig is, roughly, that of a cutter, with a deliciously curved gaff that is the secret envy of all real cutters.

Her supreme advantage, from my point of view, is that she has well over six feet of head-room in the saloon and in the sleeping-cabins. And, next, that the owner’s bed is precisely similar to the celestial bed which he enjoyed on a certain unsurpassed American liner. Further, she carries a piano and an encyclopedia, two necessaries of life. I may say that I have never known another yacht that carried an encyclopedia in more than a score of volumes. Again, she is eternal. She has timbers that recall those of the Constitution. There are Dutch eel-boats on the Thames which look almost exactly like her at a distance, and which were launched before Victoria came to the throne. She has a cockpit in which Hardy might have kissed Nelson. She sails admirably with a moderate wind on the quarter. More important still, by far, she draws only three feet eight inches, and hence can often defy charts, and slide over sands where deep-draft boats would rightly fear to tread; she has even been known to sail through fields.

Possibly for some folk her chief attribute would be that, once seen, she cannot be forgotten. She is a lovely object, and not less unusual than lovely. She is smart also, but nothing more dissimilar to the average smart, conventional English or American yacht can well be conceived. She is a magnet for the curious. When she goes under a railway bridge while a train is going over it, the engine-driver, of no matter what nationality, will invariably risk the lives of all his passengers in order to stare at her until she is out of sight. This I have noticed again and again. The finest compliment her appearance ever received was paid by a schoolboy, who, after staring at her for about a quarter of an hour as she lay at a wharf at Kingston-on-Thames, sidled timidly up to me as I leaned in my best maritime style over the quarter, and asked, “Please, sir, is this a training brig?” Romance gleamed in that boy’s eye.

As for her defects, I see no reason why I should catalogue them at equal length. But I admit that, to pay for her headroom, she has no promenade-deck for the owner and his friends to “pace,” unless they are prepared to exercise themselves on the roof of the saloon. Also that, owing to her shallowness, she will ignobly blow off when put up to the wind. Indeed, the skipper himself, who has proved that she will live in any sea, describes her progress under certain conditions as “one mile ahead and two miles to leeward”; but he would be hurt if he were taken seriously. Her worst fault is due to her long, overhanging prow, which pounds into a head sea with a ruthlessness that would shake the funnels off a torpedo-boat. You must not press her. Leave her to do her best, and she will do it splendidly; but try to bully her, and she will bury her nose and defy you.

That morning on the wide, broad Schelde, with driving rain, and an ever-freshening northwester worrying her bows, she was not pressed, and she did not sink; but her fierce gaiety was such as to keep us all alive. She threshed the sea. The weather multiplied, until the half-inch wire rope that is the nerve between the wheel and the rudder snapped, and we were at the mercy, etc. While the skipper, with marvelous resource and rapidity, was improvising a new gear, it was discovered amid general horror, that the piano had escaped from its captivity, and was lying across the saloon table. Such an incident counts in the life of an amateur musician. Still, under two hours later, I was playing the same piano again in the tranquillity of Flushing lock.

It was at Middelburg that the leak proved its existence. Middelburg is an architecturally delightful town even in heavy, persevering rain and a northwest gale. It lies on the canal from Flushing to Veere, and its belfry had been a beacon to us nearly all the way down the Schelde from Temeuzen. Every English traveler stares at its renowned town-hall; and indeed the whole place, having been till recently the haunt of more or less honest English racing tipsters and book-makers, must be endeared to the British sporting character. We went forth into the rain and into the town, skirting canals covered with timber-rafts, suffering the lively brutishness of Dutch infants, and gazing at the bare-armed young women under their umbrellas. We also found a goodish restaurant.

When we returned at nine P. M., the deck-hand, a fatalistic philosopher, was pumping. He made a sinister figure in the dark. And there was the sound of the rain on our umbrellas, and the sound of the pumped water pouring off our decks down into the unseen canal. I asked him why he was pumping at that hour. He answered that the ship leaked. It did. The forecastle floor was under an inch of water, and water was pushing up the carpet of the starboard sleeping-cabin, and all the clean linen in the linen-locker was drenched. In a miraculous and terrifying vision, which changed the whole aspect of yachting as a recreation, I saw the yacht at the bottom of the canal. I should not have had this vision had the skipper been aboard; but the skipper was ashore, unfolding the beauties of Holland to the cook. I knew the skipper would explain and cure the leak in an instant. A remarkable man, Dutch only by the accident of birth and parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable as a camel, adventurous as Columbus, and as prudent as J. Pierpont Morgan, he had never failed me. Half his life had been spent on that yacht, and the other half on the paternal barge. He had never lived regularly in a house. Consequently he was an expert of the very first order on the behavior of Dutch barges under all conceivable conditions. While the ship deliberately sank and sank, the pumping monotonously continued, and I waited in the saloon for him to come back. Dostoyevsky had no hold on me whatever. The skipper would not come back: he declined utterly to come back; he was lost in the mazy vastness of Middelburg.

Then I heard his voice forward. He had arrived in silence. “I hear our little ship has got a leak, sir,” he said when I joined the group of professional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick rain that veiled even gas-lamps. I was disappointed. The skipper was depressed, sentimentally depressed, and he was quite at a loss. Was the leak caused by the buffetings of the Schelde, by the caprices of the piano, by the stress of working through crowded locks? He knew not. But he would swear that the leak was not in the bottom, because the bottom was double. The one thing to do was to go to Veere, and put the ship on a grid that he was aware of in the creek there, and find the leak. And, further, there were a lot of other matters needing immediate attention. The bob-stay was all to pieces, both pumps were defective, and the horn for rousing lethargic bridge-men would not have roused a rabbit. All which meant for him an expedition to Flushing, that bustling port!

The ship was pumped dry. But the linen was not dry. I wanted to spread it out in the saloon; but the skipper would not permit such an outrage on the sanctity of the saloon, he would not even let the linen rest in the saloon lavatory (sometimes called the bath-room). It must be hidden like a shame in the forecastle. So the crew retired for the night to the sodden, small forecastle amid soaked linen, while I reposed in dry and comfortable spaciousness, but worried by those sociological considerations which are the mosquitos of a luxurious age—and which ought to be. None but a tyrant convinced of the divine rights of riches could be always at ease on board a small yacht; on board a large one, as in a house, the contrasts are less point-blank. And yet must small yachts he abolished? Absurd idea! Civilization is not so simple an affair as it seems to politicians perorating before immense audiences.

Owing to the obstinacy of water in finding its own level, we went to bed more than once during that night, and I thought of selling the ship and giving to the poor. What a declension from the glory of the original embarkation!

The next afternoon, through tempests and an eternal downpour, we reached Veere, at the other end of the canal. Veere is full of Scotch history and of beauty; it has a cathedral whose interior is used by children as a field, a gem of a town-hall, and various attractions less striking; but for us it existed simply as a place where there was a grid, to serve the purpose of a dry-dock. On the following morning we got the yacht onto the grid, and then began to wait for the tide to recede. During its interminable recession, we sat under a shed of the shipyard, partly sheltered from the constant rain, and labored to produce abominable watercolors of the yacht, with the quay and the cathedral and the town-hall as a background. And then some one paddling around the yacht in the dinghy perceived a trickle out of a seam. The leak! It was naught but the slight starting of a seam! No trace of other damage. In an hour it had been repaired with oakum and hammers, and covered with a plaster of copper. The steering-gear was repaired. The pumps were repaired. The bobstay was repaired. The water-color looked less abominable in the discreet, kindly light of the saloon. The state of human society seemed less volcanically dangerous. God was in His heaven. “I suppose you’d like to start early to-morrow morning, sir,” said the skipper, whose one desire in life is to go somewhere else. I said I should.

I went ashore with the skipper to pay bills—four gulden for repairs and three gulden for the use of the grid. It would have been much more but for my sagacity in having a Dutch skipper. The charming village proved to be virtually in the possession of one of those formidable English families whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-course is near. They ran ecstatically about the quay with sheets of Whatman until the heavy rain melted them. The owner of the grid lived in a large house with a most picturesque façade. Inside it was all oilcloth, red mahogany, and crimson plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright was an old, jolly man, with white whiskers spreading like a peacock’s tail. He gave us cigars to pass the time while he accomplished the calligraphy of a receipt. He was a man sarcastic about his women (of whom he had many), because they would not let him use the voor-kammer (front room) to write receipts in. I said women were often the same in England, and he gave a short laugh at England. Nevertheless, he was proud of his women, because out of six daughters five had found husbands, a feat of high skill in that island of Walcheren, where women far outnumber men.

Outside, through the mullioned window, I saw a young matron standing nonchalant and unprotected in the heavy rain. She wore an elaborate local costume, with profuse gilt ornaments. The effect of these Dutch costumes is to suggest that the wearer carries only one bodice, thin and armless, but ten thousand skirts. Near the young matron was a girl of seven or eight, dressed in a fashion precisely similar, spectacle exquisite to regard, but unsatisfactory to think about. Some day all these women will put on long sleeves and deprive themselves of a few underskirts, and all the old, jolly men with spreading white beards will cry out that women are unsexed and that the end of the world is nigh. In another house I bought a fisherman’s knitted blue jersey of the finest quality, as being the sole garment capable of keeping me warm in a Dutch summer. I was told that the girl who knitted it received only half a gulden for her labor. Outrageous sweating, which ought never to have been countenanced. Still, I bought the jersey.

At six-thirty next day we were under way—a new ship, as it seemed to me. Yachts may have leaks, but we were under way, and the heavenly smell of bacon was in the saloon; and there had been no poring over time-tables, no tipping of waiters, no rattling over cobbles in omnibuses, no waiting in arctic railway-stations, no pugnacity for corner seats, no checking of baggage. I was wakened by the vibration of the propeller; I clad myself in a toga, and issued forth to laugh good-by at sleeping Veere—no other formalities. And all along the quay, here and there, I observed an open window among the closed ones. Each open window denoted for me an English water-colorist sleeping, even as she or he had rushed about the quay, with an unconcealed conviction of spiritual, moral, and physical superiority. It appeared to me monstrous that these English should be so ill bred as to inflict their insular notions about fresh air on a historic Continental town. Every open window was an arrogant sneer at Dutch civilization, was it not? Surely they could have slept with their windows closed for a few weeks! Or, if not, they might have chosen Amsterdam instead of Veere, and practised their admirable Englishness on the “Victorian Tea-Room” in that city.

We passed into the Veeregat and so into the broad Roompot Channel, and left Veere. It was raining heavily, but gleams near the horizon allowed me to hope that before the day was out I might do another water-color.

CHAPTER II—DUTCH LEISURE

EVERY tourist knows that Holland is one of the historic cradles of political freedom, and also a chain of cities which are in effect museums of invaluable art. The voyager in a little ship may learn that in addition to all this Holland is the home of a vast number of plain persons who are under the necessity of keeping themselves alive seven days a week, and whose experiments in the adventure of living have an interest quite equal to the interest of ancient art. To judge that adventure in its final aspect, one should see Holland on a Sunday, and not the Holland of the cities, but of the little towns.

We came one Sunday morning to a place called Zieriksee, on an island to the north of the East Schelde. Who has heard of Zieriksee? Nevertheless, Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people prosecute the adventure therein without the aid of museums and tourists. At first, from the mouth of its private canal, it seems to be a huge, gray tower surrounded by tiniest doll’s-houses with vermilion roofs; and as you approach, the tower waxes, until the stones of it appear sufficient to build the whole borough; then it wanes, and is lost in the town, as all towers ultimately are. The cobbled quay and streets were empty as we moored. And in an instant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth,—men and boys and girls, but few women,—staring, glaring, giggling, gabbling, pushing. Their inquisitiveness had no shame, no urbanity. Their cackle deafened. They worried the Velsa like starving wolves worrying a deer. The Velsa was a godsend, unhoped for in the enormous and cruel tedium which they had created for themselves. To escape them we forced our way ashore, and trod the clean, deathlike, feet-torturing streets. One shop was open; we entered it, and were supplied with cigarettes by two polite and gracious very old women who knew no English. On emerging from this paganism, we met a long, slow-slouching, gloomy procession of sardonic human beings,—not a pretty woman among them, not a garment that was comely or unclean or unrespectable, not a smile,—the great, faithful congregation marching out of the great church. Here was the life of leisure in Holland as distinguished from the week-day life of industry. It was a tragic spectacle. When we returned to the yacht, the other congregation was still around it. And it was still there, just as noisy and boorish, when we left several hours later. And it would still have been there if we had remained till midnight. The phenomenon of that crowd, wistful in its touching desire for distraction, was a serious criticism of the leaders of men in Holland. As we slid away, we could see the crowd rapidly dissolving into the horror of its original ennui. I asked the cook, a cockney, what he thought of Zieriksee.

His face lightened to a cheerful smile.

“Rather a nice sort of place, sir. More like England.”

The same afternoon we worked up the Schelde in a dead calm to Zijpe. The rain had pretermitted for the first time, and the sun was hot. Zijpe is a village, a haven, a dike, and a junction of train and steamer. The village lies about a mile inland. The haven was pretty full of barges laid up for Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the railway-station and the landing-stage, a multitude of at least a thousand people were strolling to and fro or sitting on the wet grass, all in their formidable Sabbath best. We joined them, in order, if possible, to learn the cause of the concourse; but the mystery remained for one hour and a half in the eventless expanse of the hot afternoon, when the train came in over the flat, green leagues of landscape. We then understood. The whole of Zijpe had turned out to see the afternoon train come in! It was a simple modest Dutch local train, making a deal of noise and dust, and bearing perhaps a score of passengers. But it marked the grand climacteric of leisured existence at Zijpe. We set off to the village, and discovered a village deserted, and a fair-ground, with all its booths and circuses swathed up in gray sheeting. Scarcely a soul! The spirit of romance had pricked them all to the railway-station to see the train come in!

Making a large circuit, we reached again the river and the dike, and learned what a dike is in Holland. From the top of it we could look down the chimneys of houses on the landward side. The population was now on the dike, promenading in magnificent solemnity and self-control. Everybody gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely saluted everybody, and had not a moment to ourselves for miles.

“Over there,” said the skipper afterward, pointing vaguely to the southeast over the Schelde, “they ’re Roman Catholics. There ’s a lot of Spaniards left in Holland.” By Spaniards he meant Dutchmen with some Spanish blood.

“Then they enjoy their Sundays?” I suggested.

“Yes,” he answered sarcastically, “they enjoy their Sundays. They put their playing-cards in their pockets before they go to church, and then they go straight from the church to the café, and play high, and as like as not knife each other before they ’ve done.” Clearly it takes all sorts to make a little world like Holland, and it is difficult to strike the mean between absolute nullity and homicidal knives. My regret is that the yacht never got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing in cafés.

On Monday morning every skipper on every river and canal of Holland tries to prove that the stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion. The East Schelde hummed with express barges at five A. M. It was exactly like a Dutch picture by an old master. Even we, in no hurry, with a strong tide under us and a rising northwester behind us, accomplished fifteen sea-miles in ninety minutes. Craft were taking shelter from the threatened gale. In spite of mistakes by an English crew unaccustomed to a heavy mainsail in tortuous navigation and obstreperous weather, we reached Dordrecht railway bridge without public shame; and then the skipper decided that our engine could not be trusted to push us through the narrow aperture against wind and tide. Hence we bargained with a tug, and were presently attached thereto, waiting for the bridge to open.

Considering that Holland is a country where yachts are understood, and where swing-bridges open at a glance, we had to wait some little time for that bridge; namely, three hours. The patriotism of the skipper was strained. During the whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us wildly about like a kettle at the tail of a busy dog, and continuously collecting other kettles, so that our existence was one long shock and collision. But we saw a good deal of home life on the barges, from a minor barge which a girl will steer to the three-thousand-ton affair that surpasses mail steamers in capacity.

There are two homes on these monsters, one at the stem and the other at the stern; the latter is frequently magnificent in spaciousness and gilding. That the two families in the two distant homes are ever intimate is impossible, that they are even acquainted is improbable; but they seem to share a tireless dog, who runs incessantly along the leagues of planking which separate them.

The bridge did at last open, and everything on the river, unmindful of everything else, rushed headlong at the opening, like a crowd of sinners dashing for a suddenly unbarred door into heaven. Our tug jerked us into the throng, a fearful squeeze, and we were through. We cast off, the gulden were collected in a tin, and within five minutes we were moored in the New Haven, under the lee of the Groote Kerk, with trees all around us, in whose high tops a full gale was now blowing.

The next morning our decks were thickly carpeted with green leaves, a singular sight. The harbor-master came aboard to demand dues, and demanded them in excellent English.

“Where did you learn English?” I asked, and he answered with strange pride:

“Sir, I served seven years under the British flag.”

Standing heedless in the cockpit, under driving rain, he recounted the casualties of the night. Fifteen miles higher up the river a fifteen-hundred-ton barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consisting, inter alia, of all his family, were drowned. I inquired how such an event could happen in a narrow river amid a numerous population, and learned that in rough weather these barges anchor when a tug can do no more with them, and the crew go to bed and sleep. The water gradually washes in and washes in, until the barge is suddenly and silently engulfed. Dutch phlegm! Corresponding to their Sabbatic phlegm, no doubt. Said the harbor-master:

“Yes, there is a load-line, but they never takes no notice of it in Holland; they just loads them up till they won’t hold any more.”

The fatalism of the working-classes everywhere is perhaps the most utterly astounding of all human phenomena.

Thoughtful, I went off to examine the carved choir-stalls in the Groote Kerk. These choir-stalls are among the most lovely sights in Holland. Their free, fantastic beauty is ravishing and unforgetable; they make you laugh with pleasure as you behold them. I doubt not that they were executed by a rough-tongued man, in a dirty apron, with shocking finger-nails.

CHAPTER III—DUTCH WORK

We passed through Rotterdam more than once, without seeing more of it than the amazing traffic of its river and its admirable zoological gardens full of chromatically inclined parrots; but we stopped at a minor town close by, on a canal off the Meuse, Schiedam. Instinct must have guided me, for the sociological interest of Schiedam was not inconsiderable. Schiedam is called by the Dutch “stinking Schiedam.” I made a circuit of the town canals in the dinghy and convinced myself that the epithet was just and not malicious. On the lengthy quays were a large number of very dignified gin distilleries, whose architecture was respectable and sometimes even very good, dating from perhaps early in the last century. Each had a baptismal name, such as “Liverpool,” inscribed in large letters across its façade. This rendering decent and this glorification of gin constituted an impressive phenomenon. But it was the provinciality and the uncouth melancholy of the apparently prosperous town that took my fancy. We walked through all its principal streets in the rain, and I thought I had never seen a provinciality so exquisitely painful and perfect. In this city of near thirty thousand people there was not visible one agreeably imposing shop, or one woman attired with intent to charm, or one yard of smooth pavement. I know not why I find an acrid pleasure in thus beholding mediocrity, the average, the everyday ordinary, as it is; but I do. No museum of Amsterdam, The Hague, or Haarlem touched me so nearly as the town of Schiedam, which, after all, I suppose I must have liked.

Toward six o’clock we noticed an unquiet, yet stodgy, gathering in the square where is the electric-tram terminus, then a few uniforms. I asked a superior police officer what there was. He said in careful, tranquil English:

“There is nothing. But there is a strike of glass-workers in the town. Some of them don’t want to work, and some of them do want to work. Those that have worked to-day are being taken home in automobiles. That is all.”

I was glad it was all, for from his manner I had expected him to continue to the effect that the glass-workers had been led away by paid agitators and had no good reason to strike. The automobiles began to come along, at intervals, at a tremendous pace, each with a policeman by the chauffeur’s side. In one was a single artisan, middle-aged, with a cigar in the corner of his mouth, and a certain adventurous look in his eye. The crowd grimly regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were there by accident, but obviously they lacked histrionic training. In short, the scene was one of the common objects of the wayside of existence all over the civilized world. It presented no novelty whatever, and yet to witness it in Holland was piquant, and caused one to think afresh and perhaps more clearly.

At night, when it had ceased to rain. I was escorting a friend to the station. Musicians were climbing up into the bandstand in the same square. It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly municipal concert. The railway-station, far out, was superbly gloomy, and it was the only station in Holland where I failed to get a non-Dutch newspaper. The train, with the arrogance of an international express, slid in, slid out, and forgot Schiedam. I emerged from the station alone. A one-horse tram was waiting.

The tram, empty, with a sinking, but everlasting, white horse under a yellow cloth, was without doubt the most provincial and melancholy thing that destiny has yet brought me in contact with. The simple spectacle of it, in the flickering gaslights and in the light of its own lamps, filled the heart, with an anguish inexplicable and beautiful. I got in. An age passed. Then an old workman got in, and saluted; I saluted. Save for the saluting, it was the Five Towns of the eighties over again, intensified, and the last tram out of Hanbridge before the theater-tram.

An age passed. Then a mysterious figure drew the cloth off the horse, and the horse braced up all its four legs. We were starting when a tight-folded umbrella waved in the outer obscurity. An elderly, easy-circumstanced couple arrived upon us with deliberation; the umbrella was a good one.

We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long curves of suburban desolation. Then a few miserable shops that ought to have been shut; then the square once more, now jammed in every part with a roaring, barbaric horde. In the distance, over a floor of heads, was an island of illumination, with the figures of puffing and blowing musicians in it; but no rumor of music could reach us through the din. The white horse trotted mildly into and right through the multitude, which jeered angrily, but fell back. An enormous multitude, Gothic, Visi-gothic, savage, uncivilized, chiefly consisting of young men and big boys—the weekly concert of humanizing music!

I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty canal-side to the yacht. The impression of stagnation, tedium, provincialism was overwhelming. Nevertheless, here, as in other towns, we were struck by the number of shop-windows with artist’s materials for sale. Such was Schiedam. If it is asked whether I went to Holland on a yachting cruise to see this sort of thing, the answer is that I just did.

After a few weeks I began to perceive that Schiedam and similar places, though thrilling, were not the whole of Holland, and perhaps not the most representative of Holland. As the yacht worked northward, Holland seemed to grow more Dutch, until, in the chain of shallow lakes and channels that hold Friesland in a sort of permanent baptism, we came to what was for me the ideal or celestial Holland—everything done by water, even grass cut under water, and black-and-white cows milked in the midst of ponds, and windmills over the eternal flatness used exclusively to shift inconvenient water from one level to another. The road is water in Friesland, and all the world is on the road. If your approach to a town is made perilous by a succession of barges that will obstinately keep the middle of the channel, you know that it is market-day in that town, and the farmers are rolling home in agreeable inebriation.

The motor broke down in Friesland, and we were immobolized in the midst of blue-green fields, red dogs, the cows aforesaid, green milk-floats, blue-bloused sportsmen, and cargoes of cannon-ball cheese. We decided to tow the yacht until we got to a favorable reach. Certain barges sailed past us right into the eye of the wind, against all physical laws, but the Velsa possessed not this magic. We saw three men comfortably towing a string of three huge barges, and we would tow. Unfortunately the only person, the skipper, who knew how to tow had to remain on board. The cook, the deck-hand, and I towed like Greeks pulling against Greeks, and could scarcely move one little yacht. The cook, neurasthenic by temperament, grew sad, until he fell into three feet of inundation, which adventure struck him as profoundly humorous, so that he was contorted with laughter. This did not advance the yacht. Slowly we learned that towing is not mere brute striving, but an art.

We at last came to terms with a tug, as our desire was to sleep at Sneek. Sneek is the veritable metropolis of those regions. After passing, at late dusk, the mysterious night-watchers of eel-nets, who are wakened in their elaborate green-and-yellow boats by a bell, like a Paris concierge, we gradually emerged into nocturnal Sneek through a quadruple lane of barges and tugs so long as to put Sneek among the seven great ports of the world. And even in Sneek at nightfall the impression of immense quantities of water and of greenness, yellowness, and redness was continued. It rained, as usual, in Sneek the next day, but no rain and no water could damp Sneek. It was the most active town any of us had ever seen. It must have been the original “hive of industry.” It was full, and full of everything. The market was full of cattle, pigs, and sheep, crowded in pens and in carts; calves, prone, with all four legs tied together, filled acres of pavement. The cafés were full of dealers and drovers, mostly rather jolly, being served by slatternly, pleasant women. The streets were full of good shops, and of boys and girls following us and touching us to see if we existed. (Dreadful little boors!) The barges were full of cauliflowers, cabbages, apples, potatoes, sabots, cheeses, and barrels. The canals were full of barges and steamers.

And immediately one sat down to sketch a group of craft one learned that nothing was stationary. Everything moved that floated—everything on the surface of miles of canal! Everybody, without haste, but without stopping ever, was tirelessly engaged in shifting matter from one spot to another. At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty tons, would set off for a neighboring village with a few passengers,—including nice girls,—a few cattle, and high piles of miscellaneous packages; or would come in from a neighboring village. The kaleidoscope was everlasting; but it did not fatigue, because it never hurried. Only it made us ashamed of our idleness. Gently occupied old country-women, with head-dresses of lace-work and a gold casque, the whole ridiculously surmounted by a black bonnet for fashion’s sake—even these old women made us ashamed of our untransporting idleness.

Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand inhabitants!

As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden, a new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who had been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich, spoke thus:

“Is this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and live at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes, and they ‘re so calm.”

I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said:

“Well, they ‘re all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as much in another way. Sneek is the mean.”

CHAPTER IV—THE ZUYDER ZEE

WE reached the Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a respectably picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken, the alleged jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs and the costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New York for the instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the mainland, a long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said that Marken was a side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native country. So I decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner of the only foreign yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without visiting Marken. My real reason was undoubtedly that the day’s program had been upset by undue lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam. Thus we sailed due north for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken there might be something lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed.

The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you don’t mind rain, and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet. It has the appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom with our sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged field. The skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under ice, and how he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren, risking his life for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the next day, with more fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because there was no other way home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled and immense pond, with a bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of diminished trees and houses sticking up out of its horizons here and there. When these low silhouettes happen to denote your destination, they have the strange faculty of receding from your prow just as fast as you sail toward them, a magic sea of an exquisite monotony; and when you arrive anywhere, you are so surprised at having overtaken the silhouette that your arrival is a dream, in the unreal image of a city.

The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.

We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never saw one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye—beautiful domestic architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals. If it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be inhabited exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did eight sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break at billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses per head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue blouses throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story of a brown and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man was in the second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They were flinging cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we left, and they never dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung into the mysterious night, when the great forms of little cargo-steamers floated soundless over romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long, white English steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its flulfy chambermaid, and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its myriad lights and gleams, glided to a berth by the water-tower, and hung there like a cloud beyond the town, keeping me awake half the night while I proved to myself that I did not really envy its owner and that the Velsa was really a much better yacht.

The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the Dutch army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand the phrase “East Indian cigar.” He said there were no such cigars in his parents’ shop. When I said “Sumatra,” he understood, and fetched his mother. When I said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn, his mother put away all the samples already exhibited and fetched his father. The family had begun to comprehend that a serious customer had strayed into the shop. The father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity and deference went up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of cigars that were warm to the touch. “These are the best?”

“These are the best.” I bought. They were threepence apiece.

A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like too many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs—dogs that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order to prove that they are of the race that has always ended by expelling invaders with bloodshed.

I was safer in the yacht’s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched, three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into the canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone on the quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as table-tops—cleaner.

The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first glance, exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I remember it as the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner steering, and foul the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his owner, as if to say, “You see what owners do when they take charge.” I admitted it.

We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy and recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having taken to his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail in a jiffy. The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become an omnibus conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus conductor will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young man, and himself painted in water-colors.

I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town; but I know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely practical town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the cook. We were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised even by E. V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation. Kampen has architecture,—wonderful gates,—but it also has the crudest pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east wind was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner of Kampen was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen, which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning was warm and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven weeks continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three hours we were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was steering.

“Please keep the center of the channel,” the skipper enjoined me.

I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go to Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the town.

Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end surcease, and all their long-colored weins (vanes) streamed in the wind against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was the spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses that pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue ensign), and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay and held him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the spectacle of his aged father’s trading barge, unexpectedly making for the same port, with his mother, brother, and sister on deck—the crew! Arrived in port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the skipper boarded his old home with becoming placidity.

The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom nated by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a smack arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed to be always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass. The town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a square. Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in Indian reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely imitated from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the church was a picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a sacristan out of a late novel by Huysmans.

The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.

The women’s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being more visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all skirts blue. Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud, commanding, fit adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the grand manner. Their salutes were sometimes royal.

The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange warmth; the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to have been constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants, especially the visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return of their mariners; the urbanity of everybody—all these things helped to produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old, unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.

All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the canal. The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with disastrous effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In a gloomy and spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo wall-clocks, and bought a few little things. As we finally boarded the yacht in the dark, we could see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor bending over a table on which was a lamp that harshly lighted their grave faces. They may have thought that they were calculating and apportioning the week’s profits; but in reality they were playing at masterpieces by Rembrandt.

CHAPTER V—SOME TOWNS

HAARLEM is the capital of a province, and has the airs of a minor metropolis. When we moored in the Donkere Spaarne, all the architecture seemed to be saying to us, with innocent pride, that this was the city of the illustrious Frans Hals, and the only place where Frans Hals could be truly appreciated. Haarlem did not stare at strangers, as did other towns. The shops in the narrow, busy Saturday-night streets were small and slow, and it took us most of an evening, in and out of the heavy rain, to buy three shawls, two pairs of white stockings, and some cigarettes; but the shopmen and shop-women, despite their ignorance of English, American, and French, showed no openmouthed provinciality at our fantastic demands. The impression upon us of the mysterious entity of the town was favorable; we felt at home.

The yacht was just opposite the habitation of a nice middle-class family, and on Sunday morning, through the heavy rain, I could see a boy of sixteen, a girl of fourteen, and a child of five or six, all dressing slowly together in a bedroom that overlooked us, while the father in shirt-sleeves constantly popped to and fro. They were calmly content to see and be seen. Presently father and son, still in shirt-sleeves, appeared on the stoop, each smoking a cigar, and the girl above, arrayed in Sunday white, moved about setting the bedroom in order. It was a pleasant average sight, enhanced by the good architecture of the house, and by a certain metropolitan self-unconsciousness.

We went to church later, or rather into a church, and saw beautiful models of ships hung in the nave, and aged men entering, with their hats on and good cigars in their mouths. For the rest, they resembled superintendents of English Sunday-schools or sidesmen of small parishes. In another church we saw a Sunday-school in full session, a parson in a high pulpit exhorting, secretary and minor officials beneath him, and all the boys standing up with shut eyes and all the girls sitting down with shut eyes. We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protestant country in Europe.

In the afternoon, when the rain-clouds lifted for a few moments and the museums were closed, we viewed the residential prosperity of Haarlem, of which the chief seat is the Nieuwe Gracht, a broad canal, forbidden to barges, flanked by broad quays beautifully paved in small red brick, and magnificent houses. A feature of the noble architecture here was that the light ornamentation round the front doors was carried up and round the central windows of the first and second stories. A grand street! One properly expected to see elegant women at the windows of these lovely houses,—some were almost palaces,—and one was disappointed. Women there were, for at nearly every splendid window, the family was seated, reading, talking, gazing, or drinking tea; but all the women were dowdy; the majority were middle-aged; none was beautiful or elegant. Nor was any of the visible furniture distinguished.

The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to architecture, pavements, and the moral comeliness of being neat and clean. The esthetic sense apparently stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem with suspicion, as a quality dangerous and unrespectable. As daylight failed, the groups within gathered closer and closer to the windows, to catch the last yellow drops of it, and their curiosity about the phenomena of the streets grew more frank. We were examined. In return we examined. And a discussion arose as to whether inspection from within justified inquisitiveness from the street. The decision was that it did not; that a person inside a house had the right to quiz without being quizzed. But this merely academic verdict was not allowed to influence our immediate deportment. In many houses of the lesser streets tables were already laid for supper, and one noticed heavy silver napkin-rings and other silver. In one house the shadowy figures of a family were already grouped round a repast, and beyond them, through another white-curtained window at the back of the spacious room, could be discerned a dim courtyard full of green and yellow foliage. This agreeable picture, typifying all the domestic tranquillity and dignity of prosperous Holland, was the last thing we saw before the dark and the rain fell, and the gas-lamps flickered in.

We entered The Hague through canals pitted by heavy rain, the banks of which showed many suburban residences, undistinguished, but set in the midst of good gardens. And because it was the holiday week,—the week containing the queen’s birthday,—and we desired quietude, we obtained permission to lie at the private quay of the gasworks. The creators of The Hague gas-works have made only one mistake: they ought to have accomplished their act much earlier, so that Balzac might have described it; for example, in “The Alkahest,” which has the best imaginative descriptions of Dutch life yet written. The Hague gas-works are like a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this vast, clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is scrupulously in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the city and see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes, when at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising at five-thirty a.m. out of mere joyous ecstasy.

Nor did the bargemen who day and night ceaselessly and silently propelled their barges past us into the city by means of poles and sweat, seem to be toying with existence. The procession of these barges never stopped. On the queen’s birthday, when our ship was dressed, and the whole town was flagged, it went on, just as the decorated trams and tram-drivers went on. Some of the barges penetrated right through the populous districts, and emerged into the oligarchic quarter of ministries, bureaus, official residences, palaces, parks, art dealers, and shops of expensive lingerie—the quarter, as in every capital, where the precious traditions of correctness, patriotism, red-tape, order, luxury, and the moral grandeur of devising rules for the nice conduct of others are carefully conserved and nourished. This quarter was very well done, and the bargemen, with their perspiring industry, might have had the good taste to keep out of it.

The business center of The Hague, lying between the palaces and the gas-works, is cramped, crowded, and unimpressive. The cafés do not glitter, and everybody knows that the illumination of cafés in a capital is a sure index of a nation’s true greatness. Many small cafés, veiled in costly curtains at window and door, showed stray dazzling shafts of bright light, but whether the true greatness of Holland was hidden in these seductive arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week the principal cafés were emptying soon after ten o’clock. On the other hand, the large stores were still open at that hour, and the shop-girls, whose pale faces made an admirable contrast to their black robes, were still serving ladies therein. At intervals, in the afternoons, one saw a chic woman, moving with a consciousness of her own elegance; but she was very exceptional. The rest might have run over for the day from Haarlem, Delft, Utrecht, or Leyden. In the really excellent and well-frequented music-halls there was no elegance either. I have never anywhere seen better music-hall entertainments than in Holland. In certain major capitals of Europe and elsewhere the public is apt to prove its own essential naïveté by allowing itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous music-halls. The Dutch are more astute, if less elegant.

The dying engine of the yacht lost consciousness, for about the twentieth time during this trip, as we were nearing Amsterdam; but a high wind, carrying with it tremendous showers of rain, kindly blew us, under bare poles, up the last half-mile of the North Sea Canal into the private haven of the Royal Dutch Yacht-Club, where we were most amicably received, as, indeed, in all the yacht-club basins of Holland. Baths, telephones, and smoking-rooms were at our disposal without any charge, in addition to the security of the haven, and it was possible to get taxicabs from the somewhat distant city. We demanded a chauffeur who could speak English. They sent us a taxi with two chauffeurs neither of whom could speak any language whatsoever known to philologists. But by the use of maps and a modification of the pictorial writing of the ancient Aztecs, we contrived to be driven almost where we wanted. At the end of the excursion I had made, in my quality of observer, two generalizations: first, that Amsterdam taxis had two drivers for safety; and, second, that taxi-travel in Amsterdam was very exciting and dangerous. But our drivers were so amiable, soft-tongued, and energetic that I tipped them both. I then, somehow, learned the truth: one of the men was driving a taxi for the first time, and the other was teaching him.

After driving and walking about Amsterdam for several days, I decided that it would be completely civilized when it was repaved, and not before. It is the paradise of stomachs and the hell of feet. Happily, owing to its canals and its pavements, it has rather fewer of the rash cyclists who menace life in other Dutch cities. In Holland, outside Amsterdam, everybody uses a cycle. If you are ran down, as you are, it is just as likely to be by an aged and toothless female peasant as by an office boy. Also there are fewer homicidal dogs in Amsterdam than elsewhere, and there is the same general absence of public monuments which makes other Dutch cities so agreeably strange to the English and American traveler. You can scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue of a nonentity in Holland, because there are scarcely any statues.

Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland. Its architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively immanent in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of it in the mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer. Amsterdam has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever passed through the head of a stock-broker. It is excessively ugly and graceless, but I admire it for being a caprice, and especially for being a stock-broker’s caprice. No English stock-broker would have a caprice. Amsterdam has small and dear restaurants of the first order, where a few people with more money than appetite can do themselves very well indeed in hushed privacy. It also has prodigious cafés. Krasnopolshy’s—a town, not a café—is said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It isn’t; but it is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a million people.

In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the quality which above all others a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and boil over into its public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of its shops. The Kalver-Straat will compete handsomely with Bond Street. Go along the length of it, and you will come out of it thoughtful. Make your way thence to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and you will have to conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all its habitations empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and lofty and golden, are crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and dominated by rhapsodic orchestras of women in white who do what they can against the hum of ten thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of waiters, and the clatter of crockery. It is a pandemonium with a certain stolidity. The excellent music-halls and circuses are equally crowded, and curiously, so are the suburban resorts on the rim of the city. Among the larger places, perhaps, the Café Américain, on the Leidsche-Plein, was the least feverish, and this was not to be counted in its favor, because the visitor to a city which pullulates is, and should he, happiest in pullulating. The crowd, the din, the elbowing, the glitter for me, in a town like Amsterdam! In a town like Gouda, which none should fail to visit for the incomparable stained-glass in its church, I am content to be as placid and solitary as anybody, and I will follow a dancing bear and a Gipsy girl up and down the streets thereof with as much simplicity as anybody. But Amsterdam is the great, vulgar, inspiring world.

CHAPTER VI—MUSEUMS

I DID not go yachting in Holland in order to visit museums; nevertheless, I saw a few. When it is possible to step off a yacht clean into a museum, and heavy rain is falling, the temptation to remain on board is not sufficiently powerful to keep you out of the museum. At Dordrecht there is a municipal museum manned by four officials. They received us with hope, with enthusiasm, with the most touching gratitude. Their interest in us was pathetic. They were all dying of ennui in those large rooms, where the infection hung in clouds almost visible, and we were a specific stimulant. They seized on us as the morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of the drug.

Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of Ary Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not of heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer is one of its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to be another.) And posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The Dordrecht museum is waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that comes, the museum will be burned down, or turned into a brewery, and the officials will be delivered from their dreadful daily martyrdom of feigning ecstatic admiration for Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it possible to comprehend the full baseness, the exquisite unimportance, of Scheffer’s talent. The best thing of his in a museum full of him is a free, brilliant copy of a head by Rembrandt done at the age of eleven. It was, I imagine, his last tolerable work. His worst pictures, solemnly hung here, would be justifiably laughed at in a girls’ schoolroom. But his sentimentality, conventionality, and ugliness arouse less laughter than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures have come into the Dordrecht museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and Bosboom are refreshing, but even their strong influence cannot disinfect the place nor keep the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of time, and saw no other visitors.

Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop, buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and here I got it. The establishment might have survived from the age when Dordrecht was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so survived. It was full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use. It had an architectural air, and was aware of its own dignity. The head-salesman managed to convey to me that the best tea—that was, tea that a connoisseur would call tea—cost two and a half florins a pound. I conveyed to him that I would take two pounds of the same. The head-salesman then displayed to me the tea in its japanned receptacle. He next stood upright and expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely white apron, silently appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of the shop, and with solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for his superior to pour tea into. Having performed his share in the rite, he disappeared. The parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process being evidently a matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden note. Whereon the merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter from his office, and offered the change with punctilio. He would have been perfect, but for a hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I regretted this hole. We left the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit that Dordrecht had atoned to us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have made an excellent tea-dealer.

The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was a cause of joy—that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the most wonderful thing in the tourist’s Holland is the fact that the small museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a bell, and the locus is antipathetic; but one’s pulse is immediately quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally the guide-books say naught.

The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant, who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum of the kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by Rembrandt, of which he managed to exaggerate the value.

Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one’s first sight of Rembrandt’s “Lesson in Anatomy” therein would constitute a dramatic event in any yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday of the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared coarsely around, and understood nothing—nothing. True, they gazed in a hypnotized semicircle at “The Lesson in Anatomy,” and I can hear amiable persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant and the simple. I don’t believe it. I believe that if “The Lesson in Anatomy” had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of Carolus-Duran, the ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized just the same. And I have known the ignorant and the simple to be overwhelmed with emotion by spurious trickery of the most absurd and offensive kind.

An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic sense the majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be artistically civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can make any appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy of art, by which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in the midst of a vast, dangerous population—a few adventurous whites among indigenous hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may have splendid qualities, but they have not that one quality which more than any other vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the manifestations of art which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not very agreeable either. A string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth, came into the Mauritshuis out of the rain, and mildly and politely scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable. They were not intimidated. Well, I like that. I preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten thousand tourists.

Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste, as illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact that many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two superb works—a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau—could not make up for the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having time to spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is famous, and is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea, but it does not rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a sky full of kites. Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was profoundly established within me, and in that there is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.

The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town of fine architecture, is that they should both—the Ryks and the municipal—be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs, and the result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michelangelo often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects and artists more skilled than he in pleasing city councils and building-committees muddled away opportunities which he would have glorified; but he did obtain part of a job now and then, subject to it being “improved” by some duffer like Bernini, who of course contrived to leave a large fortune, whereas if Michelangelo had lived to-day he might never have got any job at all.

Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, “The Night-Watch” of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on the part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you: “Hats off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.” The truth is that “The Night-Watch” is neither very lovable nor very beautiful. It is an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering centuries in the eye, and it does so. But how long it will continue to do so is a nice question.

Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of room, despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me with youth. It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful mistakes, but at any rate it is being made under the guidance of somebody who is not afraid of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced with such a collection, one realizes the shortcomings of London museums and the horror of that steely English official conservatism, at once timid and ruthless, which will never permit itself to discover a foreign artist until the rest of the world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks there are Van Goghs and Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best, but they are there. Also there are some of the most superb water-colors of the age, and good things by a dozen classic moderns who are still totally unrepresented in London. I looked at a celestial picture of women—the kind of thing that Guys would have done if he could—painted perhaps fifty years ago, and as modern as the latest Sargent water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T. C.? T. C.? Who on earth could T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas Couture, of course! A great artist! He will appear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about the middle of the twenty-first century.

Then there was Daumier’s “Christ and His Disciples,” a picture that I would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take the subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to make you think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did this. It is true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has seen it and understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of the exalted, mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive disciples in the gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the yacht and its ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that art still lives. And I thought of Wilson Steer’s “The Music-Room” in the Tate Gallery, London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in London also art still lives.

PART II—THE BALTIC

CHAPTER VII—THE YACHT I LOST

OUR adventures toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I put into the planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a month of time at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts thinks nothing of a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere preliminaries. Hence, with admirable forethought, I determined to send the yacht on in advance. The Velsa was to cross from her home port, Brightlingsea, to the Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands, to creep along the coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark, past the mouths of the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg, where we were to join her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then to mount still farther the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by a route combining fjords and canals, cross the top of the Jutland peninsula, and enter the desired Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal way would have been through the Kiel Canal. Yachts never take the Liim Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason for taking the Liim Fjord. Moreover, English yachts have a habit of getting into trouble with the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English yachtsmen are apt to languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I was uncertain about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and I did not wish to acquire certitude.

So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large allowance of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful new 30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before the yacht’s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a week the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind held in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship had reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my Dutch skipper’s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east wind still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by cable. Then he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the mail-steamer at Harwich for Esbjerg.

She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her very first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced Danes, who had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom they chattered in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and incomprehensible. Also she was full of original Danish food, and especially of marvelous and mysterious sandwiches, which, with small quantities of champagne, we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imitated from Atlantic liners. Despite the east wind, which still held, that steamer reached Esbjerg in the twinkling of an eye.

When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in the dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it as great ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant. There was a vast fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid imperceptibly past the mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the multitudinous masts for the mast of the Velsa. Her long Dutch streamer was ever unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What the mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have done in more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the distance was simply nothing.

I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes, though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on the quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound to be on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great ship, because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The Velsa was definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of the Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled us out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of purgatory. He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he consented to be our friend, no serious harm could happen to our universe. And the hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the cigars were excellent. And the three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting demurely about the long corridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad in prints, foreign, separated romantically from us by the palisades of language—the three modest chambermaids were all young and beautiful, with astounding complexions.

The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless, I more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the extreme end of the jetty—about a mile each way each time—in the hope of descrying the Velsa’s long, red streamer in the offing. It was Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of the same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger, especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful or even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong, gusty breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.

We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we not gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a degree really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at all they wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been a southern zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but we retained them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound compensations. There were two types of beautiful women, one with straight lips, and the other with the upper lip like the traditional bow. The latter, of course, was the more generously formed, acquiescent and yet pouting, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had the effect of making the foreigner feel that to be a foreigner and a stranger in Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all the daily frequentations and intimacies of the social organism, was a mistake.

In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as we stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as it seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic, whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.

We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed about ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly thatched, and each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures. These farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change, probably for the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about thirty or forty years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in two-horse vehicles, and though certain old men strolled to and fro, smoking magnificent pipes at least a foot and a half long, the weight of which had to be supported with the hand, there was little evidence of opulence or even of ease.

The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even leap across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously, showed much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. Scores of dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a wise dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and learned the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the flat Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray purple; and as we approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles, we felt that we knew Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail to be waiting for us in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to other shores. But the yacht had not come.

Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It is true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never been heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed us, fed us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us. We called him “Ober,” a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few years, and his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself in four languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all our requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, “Oh, yes! oh, yes!” He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one ancient town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was a young girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold post-cards with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a dealer. He sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows straight from Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by fragile women who saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a canopy of flags that stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He provided us with water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that we could descend to the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered from the wind by a pile of fish-boxes and from the showers by an umbrella, produce wet water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in motion.

Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or, rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry. And then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island of Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible island! What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew it not. Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We found it at last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And I had been walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the Velsa’s wein!

The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The Ober said:

“Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.”

“Yes; but the German customs?”

“Everything shall be arranged,” said the Ober.

I said:

“I don’t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.”

The Ober said calmly:

“I will go with you.”

“All the way?”

“I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak German very well. Nothing will go wrong.”

Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put on his best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly through the German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first meal at a small German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed and accepted. When the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a good meal. He took us through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes of Schleswig-Holstein. He escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured rooms for us at the hotel. Then he said he must return. No! no! We could not let him abandon us in the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious provincial town. But he murmured that he must depart. The yacht might not arrive for days yet. I shuddered.

“At any rate,” I said, “before you leave, inquire where the haven is, and take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.”

He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in it. Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style of the Velsa.

“There,” I said, “my yacht has a mast rather like that.”

I looked again. Utterly impossible that the Velsa could have arrived so quickly; but it was the Velsa. Joy! Almost tears of joy! I led the Ober on board. He said solemnly:

“It is very beautiful.”

So it was.

But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.

The Ober said:

“I will arrange everything.”

In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall I look on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a featureless stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to its junction with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers. But no matter the dullness; we were afloat and in motion.

We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland’s bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor would call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our papers, and let us go, thus supporting the skipper’s hotly held theory that by the law of nations yachts on rivers are free.

We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice, companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. “Only they don’t,” he added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and ever, and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He said that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the same ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!

We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy rain and the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the comparative freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which looked attractive on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us; it made us feel like spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little pleasure town. Even here we had not walked a mile on land before we were involved in forts and menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The whole fjord was covered with battle-ships, destroyers, submarines, Hydro-aëroplanes curved in the atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off the waves. The air was noisy with the whizzing of varied screws. It was enormous, terrific, intimidating, especially when at dusk search-lights began to dart among the lights of the innumerable fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply involved in the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew proudly, unchallenged.

The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men here and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls left us utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content to sit vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain, discharging into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense. These quiet, tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw slavish material of the magnificent imperial system, and entirely unconnected with the wondrous brains that organized it and kept it going. The next morning we departed very early, but huge targets were being towed out in advance of us, and we effected our final escape into the free Baltic only by braving a fleet of battleships that fired into the checkered sky. Sometimes their shells glinted high up in the sun, and seemed to be curving along the top edge of an imaginary rainbow. We slowly left them astern, with, as I say, a certain relief. Little, unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.

CHAPTER VIII—BALTIC COMMUNITIES

AT Vordingborg, a small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the largest and easternmost of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to be really for the first time in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had a certain international quality). We had sailed through the Langelands Belt, skirting the monotonous agricultural coasts of all sorts of islands, great and small, until one evening we reached this city, which looked imposing on the map. When we had followed the skipper ashore on his marketing expedition, and trodden all the stony streets of little Vordingborg, we seemed to know what essential Denmark, dozing in the midst of the Baltic, truly was.

Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis to this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of tradition. It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises were placidly shopping therein—the same little bourgeoises that one sees all over the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists; a bookseller who also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl actuating an efficient sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an electric fan whirring close to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a vague open space, a few carts, with their shafts on the ground; a few stalls; a few women; a butcher whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses on a stand; baskets of fruit and vegetables on the Danish ground; our skipper chattering by signs and monosyllables in the middle. That was Vordingborg.

In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though it was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last service were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and screen were ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth at a fair. Three women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the interior. Their cloaks and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor. They never even glanced at us. We left the church, and then skirting market-gardens and climbing over the ramparts of the fort, we descended to the mournful little railway station, and as we watched a little train amble plaintively in and out of that terminus, we thought of the numbers of the hymns sung at the last service in the church, and the immense devastating ennui of provincial existence in remote places enveloped us like a dank fog. We set sail, and quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we might harden our hearts and be unjust to Vordingborg, which, after all, at bottom, must be very like a million other townlets on earth.

Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis and a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the Stege Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter in a village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing—nothing but a thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo, and it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at anchor in the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving us alone in Faxo.

At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was a telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning motionless on her father’s, or her grandfather’s, tarpaulin shoulder. Full of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled from Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole of a bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the capital of the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.

And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the Velsa had less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in such ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain a “story” about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was almost equal to being anchored off the Battery, New York.

At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows of the booksellers’ shops were photographs of the director of the municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself was among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a strange, comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the streets of Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of its taxicabs was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the Royal, with first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter garden, where the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and succeeded in amusing themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a politeness that could not possibly be achieved in any provincial town in England, were it five times the size of Aarhus. And why?

Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance. Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg stood unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered together in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had had the sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of fashion, but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They were neither one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness, efficiency, constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not capture the stranger’s interest.

There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station and the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale costumes, and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a foreign country two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of Helsingôr have an architectural interest, and its fruit shops display exotic fruits at high prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles. Generals get out of a closed cab at the railway station, and they bear a furled standard, and vanish importantly with it into the arcana of the station. The newspapers of many countries are for sale at the kiosk. The harbor-master is a great man, and a suave.

The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts, we saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in fatigue uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the table another private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand, doing nothing whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed bareness of the chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the monstrous melancholy of barrack-life, the same throughout the world. Part of the castle is set aside as a museum, wherein, under the direction of a guide, one is permitted to see a collection of pictures the surpassing ugliness of which nearly renders them interesting. The guide points through a window in the wall ten feet thick to a little plot of turf. “Where Hamlet walked.” No historical authority is offered to the visitor for this statement. The guide then leads one through a series of large rooms, empty save for an occasional arm-chair, to the true heart of the Kronborg, where he displayed to us a seated statue of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme unpleasant bluish-white. An inscription told that it had been presented to Kronborg by a committee of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some anniversary. The guide said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not believe him.

CHAPTER IX—A day’s SAIL

ALTHOUGH there is a lively pleasure in discovering even the dullest and smallest towns and villages, the finest experience offered by the Baltic is the savor of the Baltic itself in a long day’s sail. I mean a day of fourteen hours at least, from six in the morning till eight at night, through varied seascapes and landscapes and varied weather. As soon as the yacht leaves harbor in the bracing chill of sunrise she becomes a distinct entity, independent, self-reliant. The half-dozen men on her, cut off from the world, are closely knitted into a new companionship, the sense of which is expressed not in words, but by the subtleties of tone and mien; and if only one amoung them falls short of absolute loyalty and good-will toward the rest, the republic is a failure, and the air of ocean poisoned. The dictum of an older and far more practised yachtsman than myself used always to be, “I ’ll have no man aboard my ship who can’t smile all the time.” It is a good saying. And it could be applied to my yacht in the Baltic. We had days at sea in the Baltic which were ideal and thrilling from one end to the other.

To make a final study of the chart in the cabin while waiting for breakfast is a thrilling act. You choose a name on the chart, and decide: “We will go to that name.” It is a name. It is not yet a town or a village. It is just what you imagine it to be until you first sight it, when it instantly falsifies every fancy. The course is settled. The ship is on that course. The landmarks will suffice for an hour or two, but the sea-marks must be deciphered on the chart, which is an English chart, and hence inferior in fullness and clearness to either French or Dutch charts. Strange, this, for a nation preëminently maritime! To compensate, the English “Sailing Directions”—for example, the “Pilot’s Guide to the Baltic”—are so admirably written that it is a pleasure to read them. Lucid, succinct, elegant, they might serve as models to a novelist. And they are anonymous.

To pick up the first buoy is thrilling. We are all equally ignorant of these waters; the skipper himself has not previously sailed them, and we are all, save the cook, engulfed below amid swaying saucepans, on the lookout for that buoy. It ought to be visible at a certain hour, but it is not. The skipper points with his hand and says the buoy must be about there, but it is not. He looks through my glasses, and I look through his; no result. Then the deck-hand, without glasses, cries grinning that he has located her. After a quarter of an hour I can see the thing myself. That a buoy? It is naught but a pole with a slightly swollen head. Absurd to call it a buoy! Nevertheless, we are relieved, and in a superior manner we reconcile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy of employing broom-handles for buoys. The reason for this dangerous idiosyncrasy neither the skipper nor anybody else could divine. Presently we have the broom close abeam, a bobbing stick all alone in the immense wilderness of water. There it is on the chart, and there it is in the water, a romantic miracle. We assuage its solitude for a few minutes, and then abandon it to loneliness.