FROM THE
LOG
OF THE
VELSA ARNOLD
BENNETT

ms.

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Bought with the income
ofthe
EDWARD WELLS SOUTHWORTH
FUND

FROM THE LOG OF
THE VELSA

AARHUS. FROM A l'AINTIN'd BY ARNOLD BKNNFT'I

FROM THE LOG OF
THE VELSA

BY
ARNOLD BENNETT

PICTURES BY
E. A. RICKARDS
AND A FRONTISPIECE BY
THE AUTHOR

HxtrtftfcetP

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1914

Copyright, 1914, by
The Century Co.

Published, October, 1914

Ed
3/43

CONTENTS

PART I— HOLLAND
OHAPTBB PAGE
I VOYAGING ON THE CANALS  3
II DUTCH LEISURE  24
III DUTCH WORK  39
IV THE ZUYDER ZEE  53
V SOME TOWNS  70
VI MUSEUMS  88
PART II— THE BALTIC
VII THE YACHT LOST  107
VIII BALTIC COMMUNITIES . .  '.133
IX A DAY'S SAIL  145
PART III— COPENHAGEN
X THE DANISH CAPITAL  161
XI CAFES AND RESTAURANTS  173
XII ARISTOCRACY AND ART  188
XIII THE RETURN  198
PART IV— ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COASTS
XIV FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE  211
XV TO BELGIUM  228
XVI BRUGES  245
PART V— EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES
XVII EAST ANGLIA  261
XVIII IN SUFFOLK  280
XIX THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER . . . 295

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE
Aarhus  . Frontispiece
The Embarkation  .... . .5
By the Quay  . 12
Writing Home . .  21
A Visitor   26
A Minor Barge which a Girl will Steer  31
The Road is Water in Friesland  38
A Friesland Landscape .  43
At Sneek . . .  1. .49
The Velsa at Hoorn . .  56
In the Church at Hoorn  . . 62
Farmers are Rolling Home .  67
In the Church at Enkhuisen  .73
The Klaver Straat, Amsterdam .  80
At Krasnapolsky's, Amsterdam .  85
The Caf6 Amencain, Amsterdam  92
In the Victorian Tea-Room, Amsterdam  98
On the Zuyder Zee . . . ... 103
Esbjerg Port .  109
The Harbor, Esbjerg  116
Entering the Baltic  122
Gently Sardonic . . .  127
The Skipper Shopping .  132
An Aristocrat Among the Laboring Classes  137
The Gate to Sweden   143
Consulting the Chart  147
Emigrant Girls writing Postal Cards Home . . 154

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A View from the Bridge, Old Copenhagen .... 160
A Copenhagen Caffi . . . .  165
In the Trivoli Gardens — Amusements during Dinner . 172
A Skipper on » Bicycle ....  177
Swedish Exercises on Deck  183
The Sound — Landing Stage of the Yacht Club  190
In the Glyptothek — Classic Sculpture and Modern Women . 195
Enjoying the Scenery of the Sound .... . . 202
Early Morn  . 207
An Official of the French Republic . . . ... 214
On the Dunes near Boulogne . .... . . 220
Making a Diplomatic Episode Out of Nothing at all . . . . 225
A Glimpse of the Kursaal, Ostend  232
Bathing Tents and Girls  237
Street Scene in Bruges  244
Scene in Ghent  249
A Rococo Church Interior  253
A Fish-Restaurant Boat  264
Brightlingsea Creek  274
The Dock, Ipswich  283
In the Estuary  294
Leaving Maldon  299
Through the Meadows  305

PART I
HOLLAND

FROM THE LOG OF
THE VELSA
CHAPTER I
VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
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 pic
tured for me as a paradise where a yacht with a
seventy-foot mast never had to wait a single mo
ment for a bridge to be swung open. When I in
quired 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
3

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 saihng 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. Sud
denly 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
4

'^#°

THE EMBARKATION

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
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 Kam
chatka, 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 sa
loon 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 appre
hension. Already the cook was displacing Dos
toyevsky in favor of a white table-cloth and cut
lery. The next morning we were at large on the billows
of the West Schelde, a majestic and enraged
stream, of which Flushing is the guardian and Ant
werp 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
1

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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
8

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
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 Ameri
can 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 invaria
bly 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 school
boy, 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,
9

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
"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, over
hanging prow, which pounds into a head sea with a
ruthlessness that would shake the funnels off a tor
pedo-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
10

BY THE QUAY

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
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 impro
vising a new gear, it was discovered amid general
horror, that the piano had escaped from its captiv
ity, and was lying across the saloon table. Such
an incident counts in the life of an amateur musi
cian. 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 ex
istence. Middelburg is an architecturally delight
ful 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 Terneu-
zen. 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 Eng
lish racing tipsters and book-makers, must be en
deared to the British sporting character. We went
forth into the rain and into the town, skirting ca-
13

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
nals 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 mi
raculous 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 Hol
land to the cook. I knew the skipper would
explain and cure the leak in an instant. A remark
able man, Dutch only by the accident of birth and
parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable as
14

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
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 Middel
burg. 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 profes
sional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick
rain that veiled even gas-lamps. I was disap
pointed. 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
15

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 hob-
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 comforta
ble spaciousness, but worried by those sociological
considerations which are the mosquitos of a luxuri
ous age — and which ought to be. None but a tyrant
convinced of the divine rights of riches could be al-
16

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
ways 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 be 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 ex
isted simply as a place where there was a grid, to
serve the purpose of a dry-dock. On the follow
ing 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 water-
17

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
colors 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 re
paired with oakum and hammers, and covered with
a plaster of copper. The steering-gear was re
paired. The pumps were repaired. The bobstay
was repaired. The water-color looked less abomi
nable 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 hfe 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 pos
session of one of those formidable English families
whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-
course is near. They ran ecstatically about the
18

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
quay with sheets of Whatman until the heavy rain
melted them. The owner of the grid hved in a
large house with a most picturesque facade. In
side it was all oilcloth, red mahagony, and crimson
plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright
was an old, jolly man, with white whiskers spread
ing 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-hammer (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 unpro
tected 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
19

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
was a girl of seven or eight, dressed in a fashion pre
cisely similar, spectacle exquisite to regard, but un
satisfactory to think about. Some day all these
women will put on long sleeves and deprive them
selves 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 quahty, 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
20

{*^ tt^SSii

•'^

WRITING HOME

VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
Veere — no other formalities. And all along the
quay, here and there, I observed an open window
among the closed ones. Each open window de
noted 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 ar
rogant 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 prac
tised 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 al
lowed me to hope that before the day was out I
might do another water-color.

23

CHAPTER II
DUTCH LEISURE
EVERY tourist knows that Holland is one
of the historic cradles of poHtical freedom,
and also a chain of cities which are in effect mu
seums 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 adven
ture in its final aspect, one should see Holland on
a Sunday, and not the Holland of the cities, but of
the httle 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? Neverthe
less, Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people
prosecute the adventure therein without the aid of
24

PMFT$

A VISITOR

DUTCH LEISURE
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 in
stant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth, —
men and boys and girls, but few women, — staring,
glaring, giggling, gabbling, pushing. Their in-
quisitiveness 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 pohte 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
27

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
was comely or unclean or unrespectable, not a smile,
— the great, faithful congregation marching out of
the great church. Here was the hfe 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 Zie
riksee. 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 pretermit
ted 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
28

DUTCH LEISURE
Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the rail
way-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 possi
ble, 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 land
scape. 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, mak
ing 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
29

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
population was now on the dike, promenading in
magnificent solemnity and self-control. Every
body gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely
saluted everybody, and had not a moment to our
selves for miles.
"Over there," said the skipper afterward, point
ing vaguely to the southeast over the Schelde,
"they 're Roman Catholics. There 's a lot of Span
iards 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 cafe, 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 homi
cidal knives. My regret is that the yacht never
got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing
in cafes.
On Monday morning every skipper on every
river and canal of Holland tries to prove that the
30

A MINOR BARGE WHICH A GIRL WILL STEER

DUTCH LEISURE
stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion. The
East Schelde hummed with express barges at five
A. m. It was exactly hke 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 unaccus
tomed 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 patri
otism of the skipper was strained. During the
whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us
wildly about hke a kettle at the tail of a busy dog,
and continuously collecting other kettles, so that
33

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 steam
ers 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 dis
tant 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 min
utes 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 car
peted with green leaves, a singular sight. The har-
34

DUTCH LEISURE
bor-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. Fif
teen miles higher up the river a fifteen-hundred-ton
barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consist
ing, inter alia, of all his family, were drowned. I
inquired how such an event could happen in a nar
row 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-mas
ter: "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
35

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 unf or-
getable ; 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.

36

THE ROAD IS WATER IN FRIESLAND

CHAPTER III

DUTCH WORK

W"E 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 inchned
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 con
vinced myself that the epithet was just and not
malicious. On the lengthy quays were a large
number of very dignified gin distilleries, whose ar
chitecture 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 facade. This
39

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
rendering decent and this glorification of gin con
stituted 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 pave
ment. I know not why I find an acrid pleasure in
thus beholding mediocrity, the average, the every
day 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 elec
tric-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
40

DUTCH WORK
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 be
gan 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 ad
venturous look in his eye. The crowd grimly
regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were
there by accident, but obviously they lacked histri
onic 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 what
ever, 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 es
corting a friend to the station. Musicians were
climbing up into the bandstand in the same square.
It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly mu
nicipal concert. The railway-station, far out, was
41

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
superbly gloomy, and it was the only station in Hol
land 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 des
tiny has yet brought me in contact with. The sim
ple spectacle of it, in the flickering gashghts 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, intensi
fied, 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.
42

***>

^

A FRIESLAND LANDSCAPE

DUTCH WORK
We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long
curves of suburban desolation. Then a few miser
able 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 hu
manizing music!
I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty
canal-side to the yacht. The impression of stag
nation, 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 Schie-
45

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
dam 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 suc
cession of barges that will obstinately keep the mid
dle 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
46

DUTCH WORK
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 adven
ture 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 de
sire 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 im-
47

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
mense quantities of water and of greenness, yellow
ness, 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 cafes 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 bar
rels. 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 en
gaged in shifting matter from one spot to another.
At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty,
48

AT SNEEK

DUTCH WORK
eighty tons, would set off for a neighboring village
with a few passengers, — including nice girls, — a
few cattle, and high piles of miscellaneous pack
ages ; or would come in from a neighboring village.
The kaleidoscope was everlasting; but it did not fa
tigue, 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 memo
rable. 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 hve at Sneek, and marry
51

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 fright
ened 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."

52

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 silhou
ette 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, unforget-
able, that we had missed. 53

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, pro
vided 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 un
der ice, and how he had crossed it on foot between
Enkhuizen and Stavoren, risking his hfe 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 silhou
ettes 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 sil
houette that your arrival is a dream, in the unreal
image of a city.
The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.
54

. ] I

hi, \ v\ \

THE VELSA AT HOORN

THE ZUYDER ZEE
We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead
cities, and never saw one. Hoorn is a delightful vi
sion 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 ap
proaches 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 Hoom I saw three men in blue blouses
throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the
second story of a brown and yellow and green ware
house into a yellow cart. One man was in the sec
ond 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
httle cargo-steamers floated soundless over romance
to moor at the dark quays, and the long, white Eng-
57

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
lish steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and
its fluffy 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 inten
sified 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 offi
cers of the Dutch army had to be able to speak Eng
lish, French, and German. Oh, British army offi
cer! 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
58

THE ZUYDER ZEE
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, Amster
dam, whose politeness and soft voices would have
atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Dutch
middle and upper classes have adorable manners.
It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop
for the terrors of the long, exposed Hoorn High
Street, infested, like too many Dutch streets, by
wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs —
dogs that will threaten you for a mile 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 vio-
59

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
lent young housewives were continually splashing
buckets into the canal behind me as they laved and
scrubbed every separate stone on the quay. If ca
nals 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, disap
pointing at the first glance, exerts a more subtle
fascination than Hoorn. However, I remember it
as the place where we saw another yacht come in,
the owner steering, and foul the piles at the en
trance. 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 im
perative to shorten sail in a jiffy. The last that I
heard of this cook was that he had become an om
nibus conductor. Some people are born to rise,
and the born omnibus conductor will reach that es-
60

*r

IN THE CHURCH AT HOORN

THE ZUYDER ZEE
tate 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 provo
cation. Kampen has architecture, — wonderful
gates, — but it also has the cruelest 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 char
coal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen,
which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on Sep
tember 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 skip
per enjoined me. 63

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced
at me as skippers are privileged to glance at own
ers, 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 Enghsh 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
tveins (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 wag
ons, 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

THE ZUYDER ZEE
aged father's trading barge, unexpectedly making
for the same port, with his mother, brother, and sis
ter 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 placid
ity. The port was a magnificent medley of primary
colors, and the beautiful forms of boats, and the
heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dominated
by the vueins 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 per
fect 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 ghmpses
65

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 Huys-
mans. 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 con
structed 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
66

.^2S*

FARMERS ARE ROLLING HOME

THE ZUYDER ZEE
altered from minute to minute, with disastrous ef
fect 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 ar
bor bending over a table on which was a lamp that
harshly lighted their grave faces. They may have
thought that they were calculating and apportion
ing the week's profits ; but in reality they were play
ing at masterpieces by Rembrandt.

69

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 archi
tecture 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 shop
men and shop-women, despite their ignorance of
English, American, and French, showed no open-
mouthed provinciality at our fantastic demands.
The impression upon us of the mysterious entity
of the town was favorable ; we felt at home.
70

SOME TOWNS
The yacht was just opposite the habitation of
a nice middle-class family, and on Sunday morn
ing, 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 con
stantly popped to and fro. They were calmly con
tent 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, en
hanced by the good architecture of the house,
and by a certain metropolitan self-unconscious
ness. 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 resem
bled 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
71

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
eyes and all the girls sitting down with shut eyes.
We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protest-
tant 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 magnif
icent 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 disap
pointed. 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 visi
ble furniture distinguished.
The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to ar
chitecture, pavements, and the moral comeliness of
72

M?£^m

^fe

IN THE CHURCH AT ENKHUISEN

SOME TOWNS
being neat and clean. The esthetic sense apparently
stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem
with suspicion, as a quality dangerous and un
respectable. 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 in
side 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 al
ready 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
75

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 gas
works. 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 Alka
hest," 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 ex
panse, 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, re-
76

SOME TOWNS
ahstically 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 cease
lessly 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 pene
trated right through the populous districts, and
emerged into the oligarchic quarter of ministries,
bureaus, official residences, palaces, parks, art deal
ers, 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 nour
ished. 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 cafes do not glitter, and
77

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
everybody knows that the illumination of cafes in a
capital is a sure index of a nation's true greatness.
Many small cafes, veiled in costly curtains at win
dow and door, showed stray dazzling shafts
of bright light, but whether the true great
ness of Holland was hidden in these seductive
arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week
the principal cafes 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 HoUand. In certain
major capitals of Europe and elsewhere the public
is apt to prove its own essential naivete by allowing
itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous music-
halls. The Dutch are more astute, if less elegant.
78

ii vAOOC?^

¦'Mfe\£

9; MJW-»

THE KALVER-STRAAT, AMSTERDAM

SOME TOWNS
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, car
rying 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 smok
ing-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 whatso
ever 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 al
most where we wanted. At the end of the excur
sion 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
81

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
energetic that I tipped them both. I then, some
how, 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 Am
sterdam, everybody uses a cycle. If you are run
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 Am
sterdam than elsewhere, and there is the same gen
eral absence of public monuments which makes
other Dutch cities so agreeably strange to the Eng
lish 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 distin
guished. Its historic past is impressively imma-
82

SOME TOWNS
nent 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 pri
vacy. It also has prodigious cafes. Krasnopol-
shy's — a town, not a cafe — is said in Amsterdam
to be the largest cafe in Europe. It is n't ; but it
is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half
a million people.
In the prodigious cafes you perceive that Am
sterdam possesses the quality which above all others
a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast
masses of human beings simmer in its thorough
fares and boil over into its public resorts. The nar
row Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged
83

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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, scintil
lating cafes, 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 equaUy crowded, and curiously, so
are the suburban resorts on the rim of the city.
Among the larger places, perhaps, the Cafe
Americain, on the Leidsche-Plein, was the least fe
verish, and this was not to be counted in its favor,
because the visitor to a city which pullulates is, and
should be, 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
84

AT KRASNAPOLSKY'S, AMSTERDAM

SOME TOWNS
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.

87

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 f alhng, 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 al
most 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,
88

MUSEUMS
and Ary Scheffer is one of its more glaring mis
takes. (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 mu
seum will be burned down, or turned into a brew
ery, and the officials will be delivered from their
dreadful daily martyrdom of feigning ecstatic ad
miration 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' school
room. But his sentimentality, conventionality,
and ugliness arouse less laughter than nausea. By
chance a few fine pictures have come into the Dor
drecht 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.
89

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 Hol
land. 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 per
formed his share in the rite, he disappeared. The
parcel was slowly made up, every part of the proc-
90

^rpjp JJm

THE CAFE AMERICAIN, AMSTERDAM

MUSEUMS
ess 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 punc
tilio. 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 re
member 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 Haar
lem, with its prodigious renown, does not disap
point. You enter it with disturbing preliminaries,
each visitor having to ring a bell, and the locus is
antipathetic; but one's pulse is immediately quick
ened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces
93

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
of Hals. And Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influ
ential here, and even the mediocre paintings have
often an interest of perversity, as to which natu
rally the guide-books say naught.
The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few
intoxicating works, mixed up with a sinister as
sortment of mechanical models. And its aged at
tendant, 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
94

MUSEUMS
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 hypno
tized just the same. And I have known the igno
rant 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 precari
ously 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 vivi
fies. They are jockeyed into paying for the mani-
95

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
festations 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 po
litely scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable.
They were not intimidated. Well, I like that. I
preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten thou
sand tourists.
Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Mu
seum 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 al
lowing 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 yel
low and a gloomy spot, with a sky full of kites.
Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I
96

¦?:•!•' « iLT^t «)>•>-

IN THE VICTORIAN TEA-ROOM, AMSTERDAM

MUSEUMS
left Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was pro
foundly estabhshed within me, and in that there is
something final and splendid. Melancholy when
it becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as brac
ing 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 per
manent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michel
angelo often had to sit glum and idle while medio
cre 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"
99

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 Rem
brandt 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 won
dering 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 reendowed 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 short
comings of London museums and the horror of that
steely Enghsh official conservatism, at once timid
and ruthless, which will never permit itself to dis
cover a foreign artist until the rest of the world has
begun to forget him. At the Ryks there are Van
Goghs and Cezannes and Bonnards. They are
not the best, but they are there. Also there are
100

MUSEUMS
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. be? I summoned an attendant. Thomas
Couture, of course ! A great artist ! He will ap
pear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square,
about the middle of the twenty-first century.
Then there was Daumier's "Christ and His Dis
ciples," 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 un
derstood its tender sarcasm can forget that group
of the exalted, mystical Christ talking to semi-in
credulous, unperceptive disciples in the gloomy and
101

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 hves.

102

ON THE ZUYDER ZEE

PART II
THE BALTIC

CHAPTER VII
THE YACHT LOST
OUR adventures toward the Baltic began al
most 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, Brightling-
sea, to the Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many
islands, to creep along the coasts of Hanover, Hol-
stein, 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
107

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 Ger
man Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English yachts
men 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. Noth
ing 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 in
tended 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 ca-
108

ESBJERG PORT

THE YACHT LOST
ble 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 Hel
der. 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 line. 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 incomprehen
sible. Also she was full of original Danish food,
and especially of marvelous and mysterious sand
wiches, which, with small quantities of champagne,
we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imi
tated 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 Satur
day evening that we had the thrill of entering an
unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor,
111

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 twihght, 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 noth
ing. 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, be
cause he never failed. Were miracles necessary,
he would have accomplished miracles. But he was
not on the quay. The Velsa was definitely not at
Esbjerg. 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
112

THE YACHT LOST
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 se
rious harm could happen to our universe. And the
hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the ci
gars were excellent. And the three chambermaids
of the hotel, flitting demurely about the long cor
ridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad in prints,
foreign, separated romantically from us by the
palisades of language — the three modest chamber
maids were all young and beautiful, with astound
ing 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 thor-
113

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
oughfare in which to hnger, 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 of
fensive 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 hght Sunday summer frocks, had
beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a de
gree 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 inele
gance, but we retained them. And we saw that hfe
in Esbjerg must have profound compensations.
There were two types of beautiful women, one with
straight lips, and the other with the upper hp hke
the traditional bow. The latter, of course, was the
more generously formed, acquiescent and yet pout
ing, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had
the effect of making the foreigner feel that to be
114

THE HARBOR, ESBJERG

THE YACHT LOST
a foreigner and a stranger in Esbjerg, forcibly
aloof from all the daily frequentations and intima
cies of the social organism, was a mistake.
In the afternoon we hired an automobile, osten
sibly 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 Mediterra
nean. 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 fig
ures. 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
117

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 cychsts 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 farm
yard, 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 it
self 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,
118

THE YACHT LOST
after a tour of 120 miles, we felt that we knew Jut
land 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 invalu
able. He soothed us, fed us, diverted us, inter
preted 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
119

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 contin
ually 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 im
possible island! What a name for an island at
which to be weatherbound ! We knew it not. Bae
deker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of
it. We found it at last on a map more than a hun
dred miles to the south. And I had been walking
120

ENTERING THE BALTIC

THE YACHT LOST
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, Ger
many. 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 bureau
cracy 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
123

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 Fried-
richstadt, 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
hot 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
hke 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:
124

THE YACHT LOST
"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 bill. 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 kilo
meters. But no matter the dullness ; we were afloat
and in motion.
We spent about seventy-two hours in the Ger
man Empire, and emerged from it, at Kiel, by the
canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had sev
eral 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
125

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 har
bor would call on us. However, he did not call on
us ; he returned our papers, and let us go, thus sup
porting 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 prop
osition that the canal was very ugly indeed, he re
pudiated 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 north
easter, and we pushed forward into the comparative
126

GENTLY SARDONIC

THE YACHT LOST
freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort,
which looked attractive on the chart. But Fried
richsort 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-aeroplanes curved in the atmos
phere, 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 hghts 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 prome
nade at a spot where a powerful drain, discharging
into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the
129

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
sense. These quiet, tired, submissive persons
struck us as being the raw slavish material of the
magnificent imperial system, and entirely uncon
nected 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 battle
ships 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, unmihtary Denmark
lay ahead.

130

^>zfj?

THE SKIPPER SHOPPING

CHAPTER VIII
BALTIC COMMUNITIES
AT Vordingborg, a small town at the extreme
south of Sjffilland, the largest and eastern
most of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to be
really for the first time in pure and simple Den
mark (Esbjerg had a certain international qual
ity) . 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 tradi-
133

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
tion. It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and com
fortable bourgeoises were placidly shopping therein
— the same httle bourgeoises that one sees all over
the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacco
nists; 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
134

BALTIC COMMUNITIES
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 httle 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 im
mense 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 Vording
borg, which, after all, at bottom, must be very like a
million other townlets on earth.
Compared with some of the ports we made, Vord
ingborg was a metropolis and a center of art.
When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and
the Stege Strand and the intricacies of the Roges-
trommen, 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
135

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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
Sjselland, a small, untidy fishing village with a har
bor 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 shoul
der. 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 re
gatta, and the Velsa had less of the air of an aristo
crat 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 Enghsh ensign. It was almost
equal to being anchored off the Battery, New York.
136

AN ARISTOCRAT AMONG THE LABORING CLASSES.

BALTIC COMMUNITIES
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 mu
nicipal 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 cafes 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 gar
den, 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 civihzation. So far in our Danish experience
the women of Esbjerg stood unrivaled. The la-
139

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
dies 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 fash
ion, but they did not arrive at any effect of in
dividuality. 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 Helsingor (Elsinore),
a town much smaller than Aarhus, but probably
enlivened by naval and military influences, by its
close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry com
munication 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 roman
tic spectacle. The churches of Helsingor 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
140

BALTIC COMMUNITIES
the railway station, and they bear a furled stand
ard, 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 build
ing of such heroic proportions in such a dramati
cally conceived situation. The castle is of course
used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enor
mous 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 ta
ble 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 per
mitted to see a collection of pictures the surpassing
141

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
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 English
men a few years earher to mark some anniversary.
The guide said it was a statue of Shakspere. I
could not believe him.

142

Is

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I. *m
sfi£5?**
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THE GATE TO SWEDEN
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 subtle
ties of tone and mien ; and if only one among 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 al-
145

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
ways to be, "I '11 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 falsi
fies 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 de
ciphered 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 preeminently 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
146

CONSULTING THE CHART

A DAY'S SAIL
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 swol
len head. Absurd to call it a buoy ! Nevertheless,
we are relieved, and in a superior manner we re
concile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy of em
ploying 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 mir
acle. We assuage its solitude for a few minutes,
and then abandon it to loneliness.
We resume the study of the chart; for although
149

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
we are quite sure of our course, the skipper can
never be sure enough. My attention is drawn to
a foot-note that explains the ice-signals of the Bal
tic. And the skipper sets to telhng tales of terror
about the ice, in the Zuyder Zee and other seas.
He tells how the ice forms under the ship surrepti
tiously, coming up from the bottom like treacle.
You say, "It 's freezing to-night," and the next
morning the ship can't move; and you may die of
starvation, for though the ice will hold the ship,
it won't hold you. The skipper knew men who
could remember ice in the Zuyder Zee in June.
He himself had once oscillated for a whole week
between two ports on the Zuyder Zee, visible to
each other, pushed hither and thither by the ice,
and unable to get anywhere at all. But ice was
less terrible than it used to be, owing to the in
creased strength and efficiency of ice-breakers.
And climate was less rigorous. Thus the skipper
would reassure us for a moment, only to intimidate
us afresh. For it seems that the ice has a way of
climbing; it will climb up over everything, and in
close a ship. Indeed, he was most impressive on
the subject of ice. He said that the twin horrors
150

A DAY'S SAIL
of the sea were ice and fog. But of fog he told no
tales, being occupied with the forward valve of the
engine. We perceived that yachtsmen who go out
when it happens to suit them, between May and
September only, can never achieve intimacy with
the entire individuality of the sea.
The weather has now cleared for a while. The
sun is hot, the saloon skyhght warm to the touch.
You throw off a jersey. The tumbling water is a
scale of deep blues, splendid against the brass of
the bollard and the reddishness of the spars. The
engine is running without a "knock"; the sails are
nicely filled; the patent log is twirling aft. A
small rainbow shines steadily in the foam thrown
up from the bows, and a great rainbow stretches
across all heaven, with its own ghost parallel to it.
Among the large, soft clouds rags of dark cloud
are uneasily floating. On the flat shores of near
islands the same cereals ripen as ripen at home.
And this is thrilling. Distant islands are miraged.
Even a distant battleship seems to be lifted clean
out of the water by the so-called mirage.
And then a trading-schooner, small, but much
larger than us, relentlessly overhauls us. She
151

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
laughs at the efforts of our engine to aid our sails,
and forges ahead, all slanting, with her dinghy
slung up tight aft, over her rudder. And then it
is the still small voice of the stomach that speaks.
Hunger and repletion follow each other very
swiftly on such days. The after-breakfast cigar is
scarcely finished before a genuine curiosity as to
the menu of lunch comes to birth within. We
glance into the saloon. Yes, the white cloth is
laid, but we cannot eat cloth. The cook and the
chronometer are conspiring together against us.
In the afternoon the weather is thick and squaUy.
And we are creeping between sad and forlorn
veiled islands that seem to exude all the melan
choly of the seas. There is plenty of water, but only
in a deceiving horizontal sense. The channel is
almost as narrow and as tortuous as a Devonshire
lane. English charts are criminally preposterous,
and so are Danish brooms. Hardly can one dis
tinguish between a starboard and a port broom.
Is the life of a yacht to depend on such neghgent
devices? The skipper is worried. And the spec
tacle of a ship aground in mid-sea does not tran-
quilize. Sometimes the hail wipes out for a few
152

EMIGRANT GIRLS WRITING POSTAL CARDS HOME

A DAY'S SAIL
seconds the whole prospect. The eyes of every
body are strained with looking for distant brooms.
Then we are free of the archipelago, and also
the sky clears. The sun, turning orange, is behind
us, and the wind in our teeth. Ahead is a schooner,
beating. And she is the schooner of the morning.
Our engine now has the better of her. As we over
take her, she runs away on one tack, and comes back
on the next. She bears down on our stern, huge,
black, glittering. A man and a boy are all her
crew. This man and this boy are entitled to be
called mariners, as distinguished from yachtsmen.
We can see their faces plainly as they gaze down
at us from their high deck. And you may see just
the same faces on the liners that carry emigrants
from Denmark to the West, and the same limbs
sprawling on the decks of the Esbjerg steamers, as
the same hands scrawl Danish characters on picture
postal cards to the inhabitants of these very islands.
The sea is now purple, and the schooner a little
black blot on the red panorama of the sunset ; and
ahead, amid faint yellow and green fields, is a white
speck, together with sundry red specks and blue
specks. The name on the chart! And then the
155

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
haven is descried, and a ring of masts with flutter
ing rags. And then the lighthouse and the roofs
detach themselves, and the actual mouth of the
haven appears. Twilight falls; the engine is mod
erated ; the deck-hand stands by with a pole. Very
slowly we slide in, and the multitudinous bright
tints of the fishing-smacks are starthngly gay even
in the dusk. The skipper glances rapidly about
him, and yells out in Dutch to a fisherman, who re
plies in Danish. The skipper shakes his head, at a
loss, and gives an order to the deck-hand. The
deck-hand claws with a pole at a yellow smack.
We have ceased to be independent. The name on
the chart is a name no longer. It is a hving burg,
a poor little place, good enough to sleep in, and
no more. But another stage on the journey to that
magic capital Copenhagen.

156

PART III
COPENHAGEN

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE— OLD COPENHAGEN

CHAPTER X
THE DANISH CAPITAL
ACROSS the great expanse of Kjoge Bay,
Copenhagen first became visible as a group
of factory chimneys under a firmament of smoke.
We approached it rapidly upon smooth water, and
ran into the narrowing bottle-neck of Kallebo, with
the main island of Sjaelland to the west and the
appendant island of Amager to the east. Copen
hagen stands on both, straddling over a wide con
necting bridge which carries double lines of electric
trams and all the traffic of a metropolis. When
a yacht, even a small one, wishes to enter the har
bor, this bridge is cut in two and lifted into the
air, and the traffic impatiently champs its bit while
waiting for the yacht.
Apparently they understand yachts at Copen
hagen, as they do in Holland. At the outer bar
rier of the harbor we were n6t even requested to
stop. A cheerful and beneficent functionary
161

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
cried out for our name, our captain's name, our
tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his curi
osity being sated, waved us onward. The great
bridge bisected itself for us with singular prompti
tude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man in
charge thereof from his high perch signaled to us
that our burgee was too small. We therefore, hav
ing nothing else handy to placate him, ran up a
blue ensign to the masthead; but it looked so ex
cessively odd there, so acutely contrary to the Eng
lish etiquette of yachts, that we at once hauled it
down again. No further complaint was made.
We were now in the haven, and over the funnels
of many ships we could see the city. It was all
copper domes and roofs ; and we saw that it was a
proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns
to a beautiful green instead of to black, as in Lon
don. Splendid copper domes are the chief symp
tom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous,
tiny provincialism of the peninsula and of the is
lands, it was sensational to find a vast capital at
the far end of the farthest island. We thought
we were coming to the end of the world, and we
came to a complete and dazzling city that sur-
162

THE DANISH CAPITAL
passed, for example, Brussels in its imposingness.
We turned westward out of the main channel into
the heart of the town, and in a moment were tied
up to a smack, and the red-and-green bourse was
leaning over us ; the rattle and ringing and stamp
ing of horses, lorries, tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deaf
ened us on three sides; and a bridge trembhng
with traffic barred our way.
Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge;
crowds stood to gaze at us; steamers and ware
houses filled the prospect to the north; and under
our bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copen
hagen, each holding a dozen passengers or so, con
tinually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific
din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we
had arrived in a grand town; we knew that at the
first glance.
In something less than half an hour one of us
had gone forth and returned with grave tidings:
"This is a most exciting city. I 've already seen
lots of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-c6l-
ored hair." The charm of distant Esbjerg was at
last renewed. I went forth myself, into a very
clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively in-
163

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
habitants. In a trice I had gazed at the Thorvald-
sen Museum (which I had no intention of entering,
Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same ar
tistic plane as the inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dor
drecht), the Christianborg Palace, which had an
austere and kingly air, the very modern and ad
mirable town hall, the old railway station, which
has been transformed into the largest kinema in
the world, the floating fish shops and fish restau
rants (made out of old smacks and schooners), the
narrow, thronged shopping streets, the celebrated
Tivoli establishment, and the yacht-hke steamers
that from a quay, which might almost be called the
gate to Sweden, in the very middle of the town,
are constantly setting sail for Scandinavia. From
Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly
as in New York you go from Forty-second to
Sixty-ninth Street, or in London from the Bank
to Chelsea, and with less discipline. If the
steamer has cast off, and the captain sees you hur
rying up the street, he stop's his engines and waits
for you, and you are dragged on board by a sailor;
whereupon the liner departs, unless the captain hap
pens to see somebody else hurrying up the street.
164

nm.

A COPENHAGEN CAFfi

THE DANISH CAPITAL
An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen
was enough to convince my feet that it was not a
city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped
back to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a
carriage. He knew no more of the city than I
did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak
a single word of Danish; but I felt sure that he
would return with an equipage. What I desired
was an equipage with a driver who could speak
either Enghsh, French, or Dutch. He did return
with an equipage, and it was overpowering.
Rather like a second-hand State carriage, it was
drawn by two large gray horses, perhaps out of a
circus, and driven by a liveried being who was al
leged to speak French. I shuddered at the prob
able cost of this prodigious conveyance, but
pretended I did not care. The figure named was
just seven dollars a day. We monopohzed the
carriage during our sojourn, and the days were
long; but the coachman never complained. Pos
sibly because he had no language in which to com
plain. We learned in a moment that his ability to
speak French was entirely mythical. Then some
one said that a misunderstanding had occurred at
167

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
the livery-stables, and that German was the foreign
language he spoke. But he did not speak Ger
man either, nor anything else. He was just an
other of those strange creatures met in the course
of travel who are born, who mature, and who die
without speaking or comprehending any language
whatever. From the height of his spacious and sedate vehi
cle we gazed down upon the rushing population of
Copenhagen — beautiful women, with lovely tow-
colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The
driver only made one mistake, but it was a bad one.
We wanted tea, and we asked him to go to a tea-
garden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went.
He took us up an interminable boulevard, with a
special strip for cyclists. Thousands upon thou
sands of cychsts, all fair, passed and repassed us.
He went on and on. One of the horses fell lame,
but it made no difference. We could not stop him.
And repetitions of the word for tea in French and
German had no effect save to make him smile. We
constantly descried what seemed in the distance to
be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens.
We saw an incomprehensible colony of doll's-
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THE DANISH CAPITAL
houses — well-kept suburban huts exteriorly resem
bling houses — in a doll's garden. We could not con
ceive the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not
a tea-garden. Presently the carriage was stopped
by a man demanding money. He wore no uni
form, but conveyed to us that he was an official of
the town of Hillerup, and that strange carriages
had to pay forty-eight ore in order to traverse Hil
lerup. It seemed a lot of money; but as it only
amounted to sixpence, we paid. The man may
have been a highwayman. We looked at the map
for Hillerup, and found it miles away from Copen
hagen. We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless.
The driver drove on. He conducted us through
half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite unjustly
celebrated "Danish Riviera"; he came actually to
the end of the tram-line, and then he curved inland
into a forest (more to pay). We were now angry
and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the
roads in it no direction. Desperate, we signaled to
him to turn back. He would not. He informed
us on his fingers that he would be arriving in
twenty minutes or so. When he did arrive, we
169

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
solved the mystery. He had confused the word
for tea with the word for deer, and had brought
us to a well-known country resort called the Deer
Park. A few miserable tourists were in fact drink
ing cold, bad tea on a windy terrace overlooking
a distant horizon, far beyond which lay Copen
hagen. We swallowed the tea, the driver swal
lowed beer, and we started back. We had no
overcoats, and the Baltic evening was cold. Trams
overtook us flying at a tremendous pace into
Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame horse. In
the dusk we reached once more the desirable city,
whose women never seemed more fair to us than
they did then. This adventure taught us that the
yachtsman must be prepared for any adventure,
even the wildest.

170

\

:-^ , *
C-i ^
^^ (*} ^ — : — r^iij 'Mi
^
;<*
IN THE TIVOLl GARDENS— AMUSEMENTS DURING DINNER
CHAPTER XI
CAFES AND RESTAURANTS
THE most interesting thing, to the complete
stranger, in a large foreign city that does
not live on its own past is not the museums, but
the restaurants and cafes, even in the dead season.
We were told that August was the dead season in
Copenhagen, and that all the world was at the sea
side resorts. We had, however, visited a number
of Danish seaside resorts, and they were without
exception far more dead than Copenhagen. In
particular Marienlyst, reputed to be the haunt of
fashion and elegance, proved to be a very sad, de
serted strand. Copenhagen was not dead.
We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restau
rant, signalized to us by authority as the finest in
Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold
place, full of waiters who had learned English in
America, of hors-d'oeuvre, and of music. The
band was much better than the food, but it has to
173

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
be said that we arrived at half -past seven, when
Danish dinner is over and Danish supper not be
gun. Still, many middle-class people were uncere
moniously and expensively eating — in the main
hors-d'ceuvre. The metropolitanism of Copen
hagen was at once apparent in this great restau
rant. The people had little style, but they had the
assurance and the incuriousness of metropolitans,
and they were accustomed to throwing money
about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the
idiosyncrasies of waiters, and to being in the swim.
Wivels might show itself on Fifth Avenue or in the
Strand without blushing. And its food had the
wholesale, crude quahty of the food offered in these
renowned streets to persons in the swim.
Next we went to the Hotel d'Angleterre, which
was just the restaurant of the standardized inter
national hotel. Once within its walls, and you
might as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harro
gate, Rome, Algiers, Brussels, as at Copenhagen.
The same menu, the same cooking, the same wait
ers, the same furniture, the same toothpicks, and
the same detestable, self -restrained Enghsh travel
ers, with their excruciating Englishness. The cafe
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CAFES AND RESTAURANTS
on the ground floor of this hotel, overlooking
a large and busy circular place, with the
opera and other necessaries of metropolitan life
close by, was more amusing than the restaurant.
It was a genuine resort in the afternoon. The ex
istence of Copenhagen rolled to and fro in front
of its canopied terrace, and one might sit next to
an Enghsh yachting party of astounding correct
ness and complacency (from one of those conceited
three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white, and jew
eled in many holes, like a watch) , or to a couple of
Danish commercials, or to a dandy and his love.
Here we one night singled out for observation a
very characteristic Danish young man and young
woman with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive
voices, and the soothing gestures of the North. It
was an agreeable sight; but when we had carried
our observation somewhat further, we discovered
that they were an English pair on their honey
moon. In a day or two, feeling more expert in things
Danish, we wanted a truly Danish restaurant, un
spoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the
Wiener Cafe, appanage of the Hotel King of Den-
175

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
mark. A long, narrow room, anciently and curi
ously furnished, with mid- Victorian engravmgs on
the somber walls. The waiters had the austerity
of priests presiding at a rite. Their silent counte
nances said impassively: "This is the most select
resort in our great and historic country. It has
been frequented by the flower of Danish aristoc
racy, art, and letters for a thousand years. It has
not changed. It never will. No upstart cos
mopolitanism can enter here. Submit yourselves.
Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the nice
ties of our ceremonial, for we have consented to
receive you."
In brief, it was rather hke an English bank, or
a historic hotel in an English cathedral town,
though its food was better, I admit. The menu
was in strict Danish. We understood naught of
it, but it had the air of a saga. At the close of
the repast, the waiter told us that, for the price fixe,
we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said,
"Will you let me have a look at the cake, and then
I '11 decide." He replied that he could not; that
the cake could not be produced unless it was
definitively ordered. The strange thing was that he
176

^

A SKIPPER ON A BICYCLE

caf£s and restaurants
persisted in this attitude. Cake never had been
shown on approval at the Wiener Cafe of the Hotel
King of Denmark, and it never would be. I bowed
the head before an august tradition, and ordered
cheese. The Wiener Cafe ought to open a branch
in London; it was the most English affair I have
ever encountered out of England.
Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely Eng
lish. That very night we chose the restaurant of
the Hotel  for dinner. The room was darkly
gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly
shown to an empty table, and a menu was flung at
us. The head waiter and three inefficient under
waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for
fifteen minutes; they had their habitues to serve.
At the end of fifteen minutes we softly and apolo
getically rose and departed, without causing any
apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat
boy, whom we basely omitted to tip.
We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets,
searching hungrily for a restaurant that seemed re
ceptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck guided
us into the Cafe de l'lndustrie, near the Tivoli.
The managers of this industrious cafe had that pe-
179

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
culiar air, both independent and amicable, which
sits so well on the directors of an organism that is
firmly estabhshed in the good-will of the flourish
ing mass. No selectness, no tradition, no formal
ity, no fashion, no preposterous manners about the
Cafe de l'lndustrie, but an aspect of solid, rather
vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity.
It was not cheap, neither was it dear. It was
gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were men
of the world, experienced in human nature, occu
pied, hasty, both curt and expansive, not servile,
not autocratic. Their faces said: "Look here, I
know the difficulties of running a popular restau
rant, and you know them, too. This is not heaven,
especially on a Sunday night; but we do our best,
and you get value for your money."
The customers were samples of all Copenhagen.
They had money to spend, but not too much.
There were limits to their recklessness in the pur
suit of joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without
affectation, fundamentally decent, the average
Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and
spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant.
We ate moderately in the din and clash of hors-
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CAFF^S AND RESTAURANTS
d'ceuvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music,
and thanked our destiny that we had had the su
perlative courage to leave the Hotel  , with its
extreme correctitude.
Finally, among our excursions in restaurants,
must be mentioned a crazy hour in the restaurant
of the Hotel  , supreme example of what the
enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accom
plish when it sets about to imitate the German art
nouveau. The  is a grand hotel in which every
thing, with the most marvelous and terrifying in
genuity, has been designed in defiance of artistic
tradition. A fork at the  resembles no other
fork on earth, and obviously the designer's first and
last thought was to be unique. It did not matter
to him what kind of fork he produced so long as it
was different from any previous fork in human his
tory. The same with the table-cloth, the flower-
vase, the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet, the
dado, the frieze, the tessellated pavement, the stair-
rail, the wash-basin, the bedstead, the quilt, the very
door-knobs. The proprietors of the place had or
dered a new hotel in the extreme sense, and their
order had been fulfilled. It was a prodigious un-
181

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
dertaking, and must certainly have been costly.
It was impressive proof of real initiative. It in
timidated the beholder, who had the illusion of be
ing on another planet. Its ultimate effect was to
outrival all other collections of ugliness. I doubt
whether in Berlin itself such ingenious and com
plete ugliness could be equaled in the same cubic
space. My idea is that the creators of the Hotel
 may lawfully boast of standing alone on a pin
nacle. It was an inspiration on the part of the creators,
when the hotel was finished to the last salt-spoon,
to order a number of large and particularly bad
copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames,
and to hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls.
The resulting effect of grotesquery is overwhelm
ing. Nevertheless, the  justly ranks as one of
the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that
the architect and the other designers were forbidden
to meddle with the cooking, which sins not by any
originahty. The summary and summit of the restaurants
and cafes of Copenhagen is the Tivoh. New York
has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can
182

SWEDISH EXERCISES ON DECK

CAFES AND RESTAURANTS
only say with regret that the Tivoh is what Earl's
Court ought to be, and is not. The Tivoli com
prises, within the compass of a garden in the midst
of the city, restaurants, cafes, theater, concert-hall,
outdoor theater, bands, pantomime, vaudeville,
dancing-halls, and very numerous side-shows on
both land and water. The strangest combinations
of pleasure are possible at the Tivoli. You can,
for instance, as we did, eat a French dinner while
watching a performance of monkeys on a tight
rope. The opportunities for weirdness in felicity
are endless. We happened to arrive at Copen
hagen just in time for the fetes celebrating the
seventieth anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as
ancient as it is modern. On the great night the
Tivoli reveled until morning. It must be the pride
of the populace of Copenhagen, and one of the
city's dominating institutions. It cannot be ig
nored. It probably uses more electric light than
any other ten institutions put together. And how
ever keenly you may resent its commonplace attrac
tion, that attraction will one day magnetize you to
enter its gates — at the usual fee.
I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand peo-
185

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
pie at once in the Tivoli, not a bad total for one
resort in a town of only half a million inhabitants.
And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to
the foreign observer, not merely for the pervading
beauty and grace of the women, which was remark
able, but also for the evident fact that as a race the
Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety,
dignity, and simplicity. Their demeanor was a
lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to discover
how to enjoy themselves freely without being either
ridiculous or vulgar or brutish. The twenty thou
sand represented in chief the unassuming middle-
class of Copenhagen.
There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats,
"nuts," rascals, odalisks, and mere artisans among
the lot, but the solid bulk was the middle-class,
getting value for its money in an agreeable and
unexceptionable manner. The memory of those
thousands wandering lightly clad in the cold North
ern night, under domes and festoons and pillars of
electric light, amid the altercations of conflicting
orchestras, or dancing in vast, stuffy inclosures, or
drinking and laughing and eating hors-d'oeuvre un
der rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to
186

CAFES AND RESTAURANTS
Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose glazed
aisles were two restaurants, or floating on icy lakes,
or just beatifically sitting on al-fresco seats in
couples — this memory remains important in the
yachtsman's experiences of the Baltic.

187

CHAPTER XII
ARISTOCRACY AND ART
THE harbor-master would not allow us to re
main for more than three days in our origi
nal berth, which served us very well as a sort of
grand stand for viewing the life of Copenhagen.
His theory was that we were in the way of honest
laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the
"sound," on the northeastern edge of the city,
where the yachts lie. We contested his theory, but
we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with a bu
reaucracy of whose language you are ignorant.
The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was
opposite a coaling 'station, and also opposite a ship
building yard, and from the west came a strong
.odor out of a manufactory of something unpleas
ant. We could have tolerated the dust, the noise,
and the smell, but what we could not tolerate was
the heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing
and the anchorage exposed to it. Indeed, the
188

«£( ]gZZ^liii&<&&S38BSKB

THE SOUND: LANDING STAGE OF THE YACHT CLUB

ARISTOCRACY AND ART
Royal Danish Yacht Club might have chosen more
comfortable quarters for itself. We therefore un
ostentatiously weighed anchor again, and reentered
the town, and hid ourselves among many business
like tugs in a little creek called the New Haven,
whose extremity was conveniently close to the Cafe
d'Angleterre. We hoped that the prowling har
bor-master would not catch sight of us, and he did
not. The aristocratic and governing quarter of the
town lay about us, including the Bregade, a street
full of antiquaries, marble churches, and baroque
houses, and the Amalienborg Palace, which is really
four separate similar palaces (in an octagonal
place) thrown into one. Here all the prospects
and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly
exclusive. The eighteenth century had nobly sur
vived, when the populace was honestly regarded
as a horde created by divine providence in order
that the ruling classes might practise upon it the
art of ruling. There was no Tivoli when those
beautiful pavements were made, and as you stand
on those pavements and gaze around at the royal
grandiosity, speckless and complete, you can almost
191

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
imagine that even the French Revolution has not
yet occurred. The tiny, colored sentry at the vast,
gray gates is still living in the eighteenth century.
The architecture is not very distinguished, but it
has style. It shames the  Hotel. The Fred-
eriks Church, whose copper dome overtops the
other copper domes, is a fair example of the quar
ter. Without being in the least a masterpiece, it
imposes by its sincerity and its sense of its own
importance. And the interior is kept as scrupu
lously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the mar
ble flooring is wondrous, and each of the crimson
cushions in the polished pews is like a lady's pillow.
Nothing rude can invade this marmoreal fane.
The Rosenborg Palace, not far off, is open to the
public, so that all may judge what was the hfe of
sovereigns in a small country, and what probably
still is. The royal villas outside Florence are very
ugly, but there is a light grace about their furnish
ing which lifts them far above the heavy, stuffy,
tasteless mediocrity of such homes as the Rosen
borg. Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed
with the miscellaneous ugliness of generations of
royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight
192

ARISTOCRACY AND ART
to people of taste; and the few very lovely things
that have slipped in here and there by inadvertence
only intensify its mournfulness. The phantoms of
stupid courtiers seem to pervade, strictly according
to etiquette, its gloomy salons. And yet occasion
ally, in the disposition of an arm-chair or a screen,
one realizes that it must, after all, have been a
home, inhabited by human beings worthy of sym
pathy. It is the most bourgeois home I ever en
tered. In a glass case, with certain uniforms, were
hung the modern overcoat (a little frayed) and the
hat of a late monarch. They touched the heart
of the sardonic visitor, their exposure was so
naive. Even more depressing than this mausoleum of
nineteenth-century manners was the museum of art.
As a colossal negation of art, this institution ranks
with the museum of Lausanne. It is an enormous
and ugly building, full of enormous ugliness in
painting and sculpture. It contained a fine Rem
brandt — "Christ at Emmaus" — and one good mod
ern picture, a plowing scene by Wilhelmson. We
carefully searched the immense rooms for another
good modern picture, and found it not. Even the
193

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
specimens of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Bonnard
were mediocre.
The sculpture was simply indescribable. The
eye roamed like a bird over the waters of the del
uge, and saw absolutely nothing upon which to
alight with safety. Utter desolation reigned.
The directors of this museum had never, save in
the case of Wilhelmson, been guilty of an inadver
tence. Their instinct against beauty in any form
was unerring. Imagine the stony desert of rooms
and corridors and giant staircases on a wet Sunday
morning, echoing to the footsteps of the simple
holiday crowd engaged patriotically in the admira
tion of Danish art; imagine ingenuous, mackin-
toshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and
terrific marble Venuses and other gods; imagine
the whispering in front of anecdotes in paint; im
agine the Inferno of an artist — and you have the
art museum, the abode and lurking-place of ever
lasting tedium.
Quite different is the Glyptothek, a museum
whose existence is due to private enterprise and
munificence. It is housed in an ugly and ill-
planned building, but the contents are beautiful,
194

i&.|n

IN THE GLYPTOTHEK-CLASSIC SCULPTURE AND MODERN WOMEN

s±-

ARISTOCRACY AND ART
very well arranged, and admirably exposed. The
Glyptothek has an entrancing small picture by
Tiepolo, of Antony and Cleopatra meeting, which
I was informed must be a study for a larger picture
in Venice. It alone should raise the museum to a
shrine of pilgrimage, and it is not even mentioned
in Baedeker! But the Glyptothek triumphs
chiefly by its sculpture. Apart from its classical
side, it has a superb collection of Meuniers, which
impressed, without greatly pleasing, me; a roomful
of Rodin busts which are so honest and lif ehke and
jolly that when you look at them you want to laugh
— you must laugh from joy. And the Carpeaux
busts of beautiful women — what a profound and
tranquil satisfaction in gazing at them!
Some of the rooms at the Glyptothek are magical
in their effect on the sensibility. They would
make you forget wife and children, yachts, income
tax, and even the Monroe Doctrine. Living Dan
ish women were apposite enough to wander about
the sculpture rooms for our delectation, making
delicious contrasts against the background of mar
ble groups.

197

CHAPTER XIII
THE RETURN
WE left Copenhagen with regrets, for the en
tity of the town was very romantic and
attractive. Even the humble New Haven, where
we sheltered from the eye of the harbor-master,
had its charm for us. It was the real sailors' quar
ter, thoroughly ungentlemanly and downright.
The shops on each side of the creek were below
the level of the street and even of the water, and
every one of them was either a cafe, with mysteri
ous music beating behind glazed doors, or an
emporium of some sort for sailors. Revelries be
gan in the afternoon. You might see a nice neat
Danish wife guiding an obstreperously intoxicated
Danish sailor down the steps leading to a cigar
shop. Not a pleasant situation for a nice wife!
But, then, you reflected that he was a sailor, and
that he had doubtless been sober and agreeable a
short while before, and would soon be sober and
198

THE RETURN
agreeable again ; and that perhaps there were great
compensations in his character. At night Bacchus
and Pan were the true gods of that quarter, and
the worship of them was loud and yet harmonious.
We prepared reluctantly to depart; the engine
also. The engine would not depart, and it was a
new engine. Two hours were spent in wheedling
and conciliating its magneto. After that the boat
traveled faster than it had ever traveled. We
passed out of Copenhagen into the sound, leaving
a noble array of yachts behind, and so up the sound.
Soon Copenhagen was naught but a bouquet of
copper domes, and its beautiful women became
legendary with us, and our memory heightened
their beauty. And then the engine developed a
"knock." Now, in a small internal-conbustion en
gine a "knock" may be due to bad petrol or to a
misplacement of the magneto or to a hundred other
schisms in the secret economy of the affair. We
slowed to half-speed and sought eagerly the origin
of the "knock," which, however, remained inexpli
cable. We were engloomed; we were in despair.
We had just decided to stop the engine when it
stopped of itself, with a fearful crash of broken
199

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
metal. One side of the casing was shattered. The
skipper's smile was tragical. The manliness of all
of us trembled under the severity of the ordeal
which fate had administered. To open out the en
gine-box and glance at the wreck in the depths
thereof was heart-rending. We could not closely
examine the chaos of steel and brass because it was
too hot, but we knew that the irremediable had oc
curred in the bowels of the Velsa. We made sail,
and crawled back to the sound, and mournfully an
chored with our unseen woe among the other yachts.
The engine was duly inspected bit by bit; and
it appeared that only the bearing of the forward
piston was broken, certainly owing to careless
mounting of the engine in the shops. It was an
enormous catastrophe, but perhaps not irremedia
ble. Indeed, within a short time the skipper was
calculating that he could get a new bearing made
in Copenhagen in twenty-four hours. Anyhow,
we had to reconcile ourselves to a second visit to
Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, a few hours
earher so sweet a name in our ears, was now hate
ful to us, a kind of purgatory to which we were
condemned for the sins of others.
200

ENJOYING THE SCENERY OF THE SOUND

THE RETURN
The making and fitting of the new bearing oc
cupied just seventy hours. During this intermina
ble period we enjoyed the scenery of the sound and
grew acquainted with its diverse phenomena. The
weather, if wet, was calm, and the surface of the
water smooth ; but every steamer that passed would
set up a roll that flung books, if not crockery, about
the saloon. And the procession of steamers in both
directions was constant from five a. m. to midnight.
They came from and went to every part of the
archipelago and of Sweden and of northern Ger
many. We gradually understood that at Copen
hagen railways are a trifle, and the sea a matter of
the highest importance. Nearly all traffic is sea
borne. We discovered, too, that the immediate shore of
the sound, and of the yacht-basin scooped out of it,
was a sort of toy seaside resort for the city. Part of
the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club
is housed was used as a public restaurant, with a fine
terrace that commanded the yacht-club landing-
stage and all the traffic of the sound. Moreover,
it was a good restaurant, except that the waiters
seemed to be always eating some titbit on the sly.
203

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure
of the sound. The czar's yacht came to anchor,
huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with a blue-
and-white standard large enough to make a suit
of sails for a schooner — the biggest yacht afloat, I
think, but not a pleasing object, though better than
the antique ship of the Danish king. The un
wieldy ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed
to surround this pompous vessel, and the solitary
tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest
in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futihty of sa
luting guns ! The two Enghsh royal yachts, both
of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in every
way strikingly superior to the Russian.
Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that
restaurant terrace. At night the steamers would
slip down out of Copenhagen one after the other
to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving
parterre of electricity on the darkness. And then
we would walk along the nocturnal shore and find
it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose
bicycles were often stacked in groups, too. And
the little yachts in the little yacht-basin were
each an illuminated household! A woman would
204

THE RETURN
emerge from a cabin and ask a question of a man
on the dark bank, and he would flash a lantern-
light in her face like a missile, and "Oh!" she would
cry. And farther on the great hulk which is the
home of the Copenhagen Amateur Sailing Club
would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from within
it would come the sounds of song and the laughter
of two sexes. And then we would yell, "Velsa,
ahoy!" and keep on yelling until all the lightly clad
couples were drawn out of the chilly night like
moths by the strange English signaling. And at
last the Velsa would wake up, and the dinghy would
detach itself from her side, and we would go aboard.
But not until two o'clock or so would the hilarity
and music of the Amateur Sailing Club cease, and
merge into a frantic whistling for taxicabs from
the stand beyond the restaurant.
Then a few hours' slumber, broken by night
mares of the impossibility of ever quitting Copen
hagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness
of the dismantled engine, and over the water at the
yachts dozing and rocking in the dawn. And on
a near yacht, out of the maw of a forecastle-hatch
left open for air, a half-dressed sailor would appear,
205

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
and yawn, and stretch his arms, and then begin to
use a bucket on the yacht's deck. The day was
born. A green tug would hurry northward, splash
ing; and the first of the morning steamers would
arrive from some mystical distant island, a vessel,
like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons,
red and black funnels, the captain looking down
at us from the bridge ; a nice handful of passengers,
including a few young women in bright hats ; every
thing damp and fresh, and everybody expectant
and braced for Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary
sight! And then our skipper would emerge, and
the cook with my morning apple on a white plate.
And the skipper would say, "We ought to be able
to make a start to-day, sir." And on the third day
we did make a start, the engine having been mi
raculously recreated; and we left Copenhagen,
hating it no more.

206

EARLY MORN

PART IV
ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH
COAST

CHAPTER XIV
FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
WE waited for the weather a day and a
night at Folkestone, which, though one of
the gateways of England, is a poor and primitive
place to lie in. Most of the time we were on the
mud, and to get up into England we had to climb
a craggy precipice called the quay-wall. Never
theless, the harbor (so styled) is picturesque, and
in the less respectable part of the town, between the
big hotels and band-stands and the mail-steamers;
there are agreeable second-hand book shops, in one
of which I bought an early edition of Gray's poems
bound in ancient vellum.
The newspapers were very pessimistic about the
weather, and smacks occasionally crept in for
shelter, with wild reports of what was going on in
the channel. At four o'clock in the morning, how
ever, we started, adventurous, for the far coasts of
Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel was a gray
211

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale.
And I also was weary and uneasy, for it is impos
sible for a civilized person of regular habits to arise
at four A. m. without both physical and psychical
suffering, and the pleasure derived from the experi
ence, though real, is perverse. The last gleams of
the Gris-Nez and the Varne lights were visible
across the heaving waste, feebly illuminating the
intense melancholy of the dawn. There was noth
ing to do except steer and keep your eyes open,
because a favorable and moderate southwest wind
rendered the engine unnecessary. The ship, and
the dinghy after her, pitched and rolled over the
heavy swell. The skipper said naught. I said
naught. The lights expired. The dark gray of
the sea turned to steel. The breeze was icy. Vi
tality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed exceed
ingly remote, even unattainable. Great, vital
questions presented themselves to the enfeebled
mind, cutting at the very root of all conduct and all
ambitions. What was the use of yachting? What
was the use of anything? Why struggle? Why
exist? The universe was too vast, and the soul
homeless therein. 212

AN OFFICIAL OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC

FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft,
bearing a brass tray, and on the tray an electro-tea
pot, sugar-basin, and milk- jug, and a white cup and
saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernaha! Ex
quisite and potent draft, far surpassing champagne
drunk amid the bright glances of beauty! Only
the finest China tea is employed aboard the Velsa.
I drank, and was healed; and I gave also to the
skipper. Earth was transformed. We began to
talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling over,
spurted. It was a grand hfe. We descried the
French coast. The hours flew. Before breakfast-
time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between the
piers at Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine.
At 8:15 we ran her on the mud, on a rising tide,
next to a pilot-boat, the Jean et Marie, inhabited
by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp
to the Quai Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and
considered ourselves fairly in France.
The officials of the French republic on the quay
had been driven by the spectacle of our peculiar
Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange, emotional
attitudes ; and as soon as we were afloat, the French
republic came aboard in a dinghy manned by two
215

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
acolytes. The skipper usually receives the repre
sentatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper
speaks no French, and as this was the first time I
had entered France in this style, I thought I would
be my own ambassador. I received the French re
public in my saloon; we were ravishingly pohte to
each other; we murmured sweet compliments to
each other. He gave me a clean bill of health, and
went off with four francs and one half-penny.
There is no nation hke the French. A French
milliner will make a hat out of a piece of felt and
nothing; and a French official will make a diplo
matic episode out of nothing at all, putting into five
minutes of futility all the Gallic civilization of cen
turies. Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as
its area is narrowly limited, and its entrance diffi
cult, the amount of signaling that goes on is extraor
dinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence
a flag flies to warn the surrounding seas when the
entrance is occupied or about to be occupied. The
state of the tide is also indicated, and the expert
can read from hieroglyphics slung in the air the
exact depth of water at a particular moment be-
216

FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
tween the piers. In addition, of course, there is
the weather signaling. We had scarcely been in
port a couple of hours before the weather signaling
shocked us; nay, we took it as an affront to our
selves. The south cone went up. We had come
in at the tail-end of one south gale, and now an
other was predicted ! How could small people hke
us hope to work our way down to Brittany in the
teeth of the gale! And I had an appointment in
the harbor of Carantec, a tiny village near Morlaix,
in a week's time ! The thing was monstrous. But
the south cone was hoisted, and it remained hoisted.
And the cone is never displayed except for a real
gale, — not a yachtsman's gale, but a sailor's gale,
which is serious.
A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American
liner in the roads. We followed her along the
jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was already
blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the hori
zon. Soon we were in the midst of a squall our
selves. The rain hid everything for a minute. It
cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet,
with the variegated bathing-tents, from which even
then beautiful creatures were bathing in a shallow
217

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex
roofs of Boulogne, and to the north a road chmbing
up to the cliff-top, and the ilhmitable dunes that
are a feature of this part of the country. Above
all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue.
The skipper did not like those thunder-clouds; he
said they were the most dangerous of all clouds,
"because anything might come out of them." He
spoke as if they already contained in their bosoms
every conceivable sort of weather, which they would
let loose according to their caprice.
The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled
us to hold tight to the rail of the pier. A poster
announced that in the casino behind the rain, Sup-
pe's "Boccaccio" was to be performed that night,
and Massenet's "Thai's" the next night. And
opera seemed a very artificial and unnecessary form
of activity as we stood out there in the reality of
the storm. The Atlantic liner had now bid good-by
to the tender, and was hugely moving. She found
sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of
her bigness, and headed straight into the gale, pitch
ing like a toy. The rain soon veiled her, and she
was gone. I could not picture the Velsa in such a
218

ON THE DUNES NEAR BOULOGNE

FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
situation, at any rate with the owner on board. We
went back, rather pensive, to the Quai Chanzy.
The men in the pilot-boat alongside the Velsa
were not in the least reassuring as to the chances of
the Velsa ever getting to Brittany; but they were
uplifted because the weather was too rough for them
to go out. When the cone is on view, the pilot-
service is accomplished by a powerful steam-vessel.
Our friends, in their apparently happy idleness,
sculled forth in a dinghy about fifty yards from
where we lay, and almost immediately rejoined us
with three eels that they had caught. I bought the
three eels for two shillings, and the cook cooked
them perfectly, and I ate one of them with ecstasy
a few hours later; but eels are excessively antipa
thetic to the digestive organs, and may jaundice
the true bright color of the world for days.
The transaction of the eels strengthened our in
timacy with the pilot's crew, who imparted to us
many secrets; as, for example, that they were the
selfsame men who act as porters at the quay for the
transfer of luggage when the cross-channel steam
ers arrive and depart. On one day they are the
pilot's crew, and on the next they are porters to
221

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
carry your handbags through the customs. This
was a blow to me, because on the innumerable oc
casions when I had employed those porters I had
always regarded them as unfortunate beings who
could earn money only during about an hour each
day, victims of the unjust social system, etc., and
who were therefore specially deserving of compas
sion and tips. I now divined that their activities
were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed together
like a Chinese puzzle, and all reasonably remunera
tive. The which was very French and admir
able. Herein was a valuable lesson to me, and
a clear saving in future of that precious commodity,
compassion. In a day or two the horrid fact emerged that we
were imprisoned in Boulogne. The south cone did
not budge. Neither could we. The tide ebbed;
the tide flowed; we sank softly into the mud; we
floated again. A sailor cut our warp because it
was in his way, and therefore incurred our anger
and the comminations of the harbor-master. But
we were not released. An aeroplane meeting was
announced, and postponed. We witnessed the
preparations for the ceremonial opening of a grand
222

FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
new dock. We went to the casino and listened to
Russian music, which in other circumstances would
have enchanted us.
But none of these high matters could hold our
attention. Even when the cook criticized our wa
ter-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly
that he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought
proofs of his genius out of the forecastle, even then
we were not truly interested. We thirsted to de
part, and could not. Our sole solace was to walk
round and round the basin in the rain-squalls, and
observe their tremendous vitality, which, indeed,
never ceased, day or night save at low water, when
most craft were aground.
At such periods of tranquillity the trucks of the
fishing-smacks were nearly level with the quay, and
we noticed that every masthead was elaborately fin
ished with gilded sculpture — a cross, a star, or a
small figure of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or an angel.
The names, too, of these smacks were significant:
Resurrection, Jesus-Marie, and so on. The orna
mentation of the deck-houses and companions of
these vessels showed a great deal of fantasy and
brilliant color, though little taste. And the gen-
223

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
eral effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demon
strating, as it did, that the boats were beloved.
English fishing-boats are beloved by their owners,
but English affection does not disclose itself in the
same way, if it discloses itself at all. On the third
afternoon we assisted at the departure of an im
portant boat for the herring fisheries. It had a
crew of seventeen men, all dressed in brown, young
and old, and an enormous quantity of gear. It
bore the air of a noble cooperative enterprise, and
went off on the tide, disdainfully passing the still-
hoisted cone.
Perhaps it was this event that gave us to think.
If a herring-boat could face the gale, why not we?
Our ship was very seaworthy, and the coast was dot
ted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible
to go south, since we could not have made head
way. Then why not boldly cancel the rendezvous
in Brittany, and run northward before the gale?
The skipper saluted the idea with enthusiasm. He
spoke of Ostend. He said that if the wind held
we could easily run to Ostend in a day. He did
not care for Ostend, but it would be a change. I,
however, did care for Ostend. And so it was de-
224

¦i-i\ u-

>>

MAKING A DIPLOMATIC EPISODE OUT OF NOTHING AT ALL

FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
cided that, unless the wind went right round in the
night, we would clear out of Boulogne at the earliest
tidal hour the next morning. The joy of expect
ancy filled the ship, and I went into the town to buy
some of the beautiful meat-pies that are offered in
its shops.

227

CHAPTER XV
TO BELGIUM
AT 6 a. m. we, too, were passing disdainfully
the still-hoisted cone. Rain descended in
sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we
did not happen to be in the rain, we could see rain-
squalls of the most theatrical appearance in every
quarter of the horizon. The gale had somewhat
moderated, but not the sea; the wind, behind us,
was against the tide, and considerably quarreling
therewith. Now we were inclosed in walls of wa
ter, and now we were balanced on the summit of
a mountain of water, and had a momentary view
of many leagues of tempest. I personally had
never been out in such weather in anything smaller
than a mail-steamer.
Here I must deal with a distressing subject,
which it would be pleasanter to ignore, but which
my training in realism will not allow me to ignore.
A certain shameful crime is often committed on
228

TO BELGIUM
yachts, merchantmen, and even men-of-war. It is
notorious that Nelson committed this crime again
and again, and that other admirals have copied his
iniquity. Sailors, and particularly amateur sail
ors, would sooner be accused of any wickedness
rather than this. Charge them with cheating at
cards, ruining innocent women, defrauding the
Government, and they will not blench; but charge
them with this offense, and they will blush, they
will recriminate, and they will lie disgracefully
against all evidence ; they cannot sit still under the
mere suspicion of it.
As we slipped out of the harbor that morning
the secret preoccupation of the owner and his friend
was that circumstances might tempt them to per
petrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say
that they withstood the awful temptation; but only
just! If out of bravado they had attempted to
eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would as
suredly have been committed, but they had the sense
to order the meals to be served in the cockpit, in
the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter the
conditions! They were saved from turpitude, and
they ate heartily thrice during the day. And pos-
229

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
sibly nobody was more astonished than themselves
at their success in virtue. I have known a yachts
man, an expert, a member of an exceedingly crack
club, suddenly shift his course shoreward in circum
stances not devoid of danger.
"What are you about?" was the affrighted ques
tion. He replied:
"I 'm going to beach her. If I don't, I shall be
sick, and I won't be sick aboard this yacht."
Such is the astounding influence of convention,
which has transformed into a crime a misfortune
over which the victim has no control whatever.
We did not beach the Velsa, nor were our appetites
impaired. We were lucky, and merely lucky; and
yet we felt as proud as though we had, by our own
skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of.
This is human nature.
As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the
most majestic natural scenes I have ever witnessed,
not a gale, but about half of a gale, was blowing.
The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the
tide was slack, and between Calais and Dunkirk
we had it under our feet, and were able to dispense
with the engine and still do six and a half knots
230

A

GLIMPSE OF THE KURSAAL, OSTEND

TO BELGIUM
an hour. Thenceforward the weather grew calm
with extraordinary rapidity, while the barometer
continuously fell. At four o'clock the wind had
entirely expired, and we restarted the engine, and
crawled past Westend and Nieuport, resorts very
ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from
the sea. By the time we sighted the whiteness of
the kursaal at Ostend the water was as flat as an
inland lake. The sea took on the most dehcate
purple tints, and the pallor of the architecture of
Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were
yet a mile and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies
with stings wandered out from the city to meet us.
We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at
6 :40 P. M., and the skipper was free to speak again.
When he had done manceuvering in the basin, he
leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:
"I 've had a bit o' luck this week."
"With the engine?" I suggested, for the engine
had been behaving itself lately.
"No, sir. My wife presented me with a httle
boy last Tuesday. I had the letter last night.
I 've been expecting it." But he had said nothing
to me before. He blushed, adding, "I should like
233

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
you to do me a very great favor, sir — give me two
days off soon, so that I can go to the baptism."
Strange, somehow, that a man should have to
ask a favor to be present at the baptism of his own
son! The skipper now has two sons. Both, I was
immediately given to understand, are destined for
the sea. He has six brothers-in-law, and they all
follow the sea. On a voyage he will never willingly
leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will
rush down to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow
it in two minutes and a half, and rush back. I said
to him once:
"I believe you must be fond of this wheel."
"I am, sir," he said, and grinned.
We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and
our rudder was within a foot of the street. Next
to us lay the Velsa' s sister (occasion for the his
toric remark that "the world is very small"), a
yacht well known to the skipper, of exactly the same
lines as the Velsa, nearly the same size, and built
within four miles of her in the same year! The
next morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were
equally drenched in tremendous downpours of rain,
but made no complaint to each other. I had the
234

TO BELGIUM
awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to
keep the saloon skylights open.
The rain had no effect on the traditional noisi
ness of Ostend. Like sundry other cities, Ostend
has two individualities, two souls. All that fronts
the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is
grandiose, cosmopolitan, insincere, taciturn, blatant,
and sterile. It calls itself the finest sea-prome
nade in Europe, and it may be, but it is as factitious
as a meringue. All that faces the docks and canals
is Belgian, more than Belgian — Flemish, pictur
esque, irregular, strident, simple, unaffected, and
swarming with children. Narrow streets are full
of little cafes that are full of httle men and fat
women. All the little streets are cobbled, and
everything in them produces the maximum quan
tity of sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and
all the dogs drawing little carts bark loudly. Add
to this the din of the tram-cars and the whistling
of railway engines.
On this Sunday morning there was a band festi
val of some kind, upon which the pitiless rain had
no effect whatever. Band after band swung past
our rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some
235

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
marketing to do, as the cook declared that he could
market neither in French nor Flemish, and we
waited impatiently under umbrellas for the proces
sion of bands to finish. It would not finish, and
we therefore had to join it. All the way up the
Rue de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves
speak in the brazen uproar; and all the brass in
struments and all the dark uniforms of the puffy
mstrumentahsts were glittering and melting in the
rain. Occasionally at the end of the street, over
the sea, lightning feebly flickered against a dark
cloud. At last I could turn off into a butcher's
shop, where under the eyes of a score of shopping
matrons I purchased a lovely piece of beef for the
nominal price of three francs seventy-five centimes,
and bore it off with pride into the rain.
When we got back to the yacht with well-bap
tized beef and vegetables and tarts, we met the
deck-hand, who was going alone into the interest
ing and romantic city. Asked what he was about,
he replied:
"I 'm going to buy a curio, sir; that 's all." He
knew the city. He had been to Ostend before in
a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither in-
236

BATHING TENTS AND GIRLS

TO BELGIUM
teresting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal
toward the country. "There 's a pretty walk over
there," he said; "but there's nothing here," point
ing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for
twenty years, and enjoying it like a child, but the
deck-hand, with one soft-voiced sentence, took it
off the map.
In the afternoon, winding about among the
soaked cosmopolitanism of the promenade, I was
ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy
fashionable affectations more surely than a wet Sun
day, and the promenade seemed to rank first in the
forlorn tragedies of the world. I returned yet
again to the yacht, and was met by the skipper with
a disturbed face.
"We can't get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n't
allowed to work on Sundays. Everything 's
changed in Belgium." The skipper was too Dutch
to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was
rising in him — the passion to go somewhere else.
"All right," I said; "we '11 manage with mineral
water, and then we '11 move on to Bruges." In
rain it is, after all, better to be moving than to be
standing still. 239

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the
railway bridge would not swing for us, nor would
it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our siren.
Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skip
per. He said that he was not supposed to swing
for canal-boats.
"Canal-boat!" the skipper cried. "By what ca
nal do you think I brought this ship across the
North Sea?" He was coldly sarcastic, and his sar
casm forced the bridge open. We passed through,
set our sails, and were presently heeling over and
washing a wave of water up the banks of the canal.
I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge,
I shaved it as close as I could for the fun of the
thing. Whereupon the skipper became excited,
and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal,
because the barges were no stronger than cigar-
boxes, having sides only an inch thick, and would
crumble at a touch; and the whole barge-popula
tion of Belgium and Holland, but especially Bel
gium, was in a conspiracy to extract damages out
of yachts on the slightest pretext. It seemed to
me that the skipper's alarm was exaggerated. I
understood it a few days later, when he related to
240

TO BELGIUM
me that he had once quite innocently assisted at
the cracking of a cigar-box, for which his employer
had had to pay five thousand francs.
The barge which I had failed to sink had two in
significant square-sails set, like pocket-handker-
.chiefs, but was depending for most of its motion on
a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-
rope in good order.
Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and
simultaneously the weather improved and bright
ened. It was a strange summer, was that summer !
The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleas
antly through the water, and we had to start the
engine, which is much less amusing than the sails.
And the towers of Bruges would not appear on
the horizon of the monotonous tree-lined canal,
upon whose banks every little village resembles
every other httle village. We had to invent some
thing to pass the time, and we were unwise enough
to measure the speed of the engine on this smooth
water in this unusual calm. A speed trial is nearly
always an error of tact, for the reason that it shat
ters beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful illu
sion that under favorable conditions the engine
241

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
would drive the yacht at the rate of twelve kilo
meters an hour. The canal-bank had small posts
at every hundred meters and large posts at every
thousand. The first test gave seven and a half kilo
meters an hour. It was unthinkable. The dis
tances must be wrong. My excellent watch must
have become capricious. The next test gave eight
kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to
the engine, and we rose to nine, only to fall again
to eight. Allowing even that the dinghy took a
kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of the
test was very humiliating. We crawled. We
scarcely moved.
Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would
go ashore anu walk along the bank against the yacht
until we could see Bruges. I swore it, and I kept
the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred
meters; and by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted
the memorable belfry of Bruges in the distance, I
had decided that the engine was perhaps a better
engine than I had fancied. I returned on board,
and had to seek my berth in a collapse. Neverthe
less the Velsa bad been a most pleasing object as
seen from the bank. 242

STREET SCENE IN BRUGES

CHAPTER XVI
BRUGES
WE moored at the Quai Spinola, with one of
the most picturesque views in Bruges in
front of us, an irresistible temptation to the water-
colorist, even in wet weather. I had originally vis
ited Bruges about twenty years earlier. It was the
first historical and consistently beautiful city I had
ever seen, and even now it did not appear to have
sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably su
perior to Ghent, which is a far more important
place, but in which I have never been fortunate.
Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a
different and a finer attribute. I have had terrible,
devastating adventures in the restaurants of Ghent,
and the one first-class monument there is
the medieval castle of the counts of Flanders, an
endless field for sociological speculation, but tran-
scendently ugly and depressing. Ghent is a mod
ern town in an old suit of clothes, and its
245

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
inhabitants are more formidably Belgian than those
of any other large city of Flanders. I speak not
of the smaller industrial places, where Belgianism
is ferocious and terrible.
At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished,
we went straight to Notre Dame, where there was
just enough light left for us to gaze upon Michel
angelo's "Virgin and Child," a major work. Then
to the streets and lesser canals. I found changes
in the Bruges of my youth. Kinematographs,
amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be ex
pected, for no show-city in Europe has been able
to keep them out. Do they not enhven and illu
mine the ground floors of some of the grandest
renaissance palaces in Florence? But there were
changes more starthng than the advent kinemato
graphs. Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced
the ordinary burners in the street-lamps of the town 1
In another fifty years the corporation of Bruges
will be using electricity.
Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats
were running on the canals, and at the improvised
landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges
"The Venice of the North." I admit that my feel-
246

BRUGES
ings were hurt — not by the motor-boats, but by the
signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the North,
than Venice is the Bruges of the South.
We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to
descend upon us and penetrate us, as the motor-
boats ceased to run and the kinematographs grew
more brilliant in the deepening night. We had to
dine, and all the restaurants of the town were open
to us. Impossible to keep away from the Grande
Place and the belfry, still incessantly chattering
about the time of day. Impossible not to look with
an excusable sentimentality at the Hotel du Panier
d'Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with
the fattest landlord in the world, and thousands of
mosquitos ready among its bed-hangings to assist
the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep. The Panier
d'Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-
loving tourist who could carry all his luggage and
was firmly resolved not to spend more than seven
francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d'Or
one was sure to encounter other travelers who took
both art and life seriously.
No, we would not dine at the Panier d'Or, be
cause we would not disturb our memories. We
247

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior,
and we shpped into the cafe restaurant next door,
and were served by a postulant boy waiter who had
everything to learn about food and human nature,
but who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost
saturated with the exquisite melancholy of the
Grande Place, we were too enchanted to move.
We drank coffee and other things, and lingered un
til all the white cloths were removed from the tables ;
and the long, high room became a cafe simply. A
few middle-aged male habitues wandered in sepa
rately, — four in all, — and each sat apart and
smoked and drank beer. The mournfulness was
sweet and overwhelming. It was like chloroform.
The reflection that each of these sad, aging men
had a home and an intimite somewhere in the spa
cious, transformed, shabby interiors of Bruges, that
each was a living soul with aspirations and regrets,
this reflection was excruciating in its blend of for-
lornness and comedy.
A few more habitues entered, and then a French
man and a young Frenchwomen appeared on a dais
at the back of the cafe and opened a piano. They
were in correct drawing-room costume, with none
248

SCENE IN GHENT

BRUGES
of the eccentricities of the cafe-chantant, and they
produced no effect whatever on the faces or in the
gestures of the habitues. They performed. He
sang; she sang; he played; she played. Just the
common songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls,
vulgar, but more inane than vulgar. The young
woman was agreeable, with the large, red mouth
which is the index of a comfortable, generous, and
good-natured disposition. They sang and played
a long time. Nobody budged; nobody smiled.
Certainly we did not ; in a contest of phlegm Eng
lishmen can, it is acknowledged, hold their own.
Most of the habitues doggedly read newspapers,
but at intervals there was a momentary dull ap
plause. The economic basis of the entertainment
was not apparent to us. The prices of food and
drink were very moderate, and no collection was
made by or on behalf of the artists.
At length, when melancholy ran off us instead
of being absorbed, because we had passed the satu
ration-point, we rose and departed. Yes, incan
descent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only
changes in Bruges. And in the cafe adjoining the
one we had left a troupe of girls in white were per-
251

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
forming gaily to a similar audience of habitues.
We glimpsed them through the open door. And
in front of the kinematograph a bell was ringing
loudly and continuously to invite habitues, and no
habitues were responding. It was all extremely
mysterious. The chimes of the belfry flung their
strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of
these and of the habitues gave birth in us to a sus
picion that perhaps, after all, Bruges had not
changed. We moved away out of the Grande Place into
the maze of Bruges toward the Quai Spinola, our
footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares
of large houses the fronts of which showed dim and
lofty rooms inhabited by the historical past and also
no doubt by habitues. And after much wandering
I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city
which I was supposed to know like my birthplace.
And at the corner of a street, beneath an incandes
cent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold
it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the
lowest rank of tourists.
As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation,
the carillon of the belfry suddenly came to us over
252

A ROCOCO CHURCH INTERIOR

BRUGES
a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the clockwork
chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing
on the bells, a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant.
The effect was ravishing, as different from that of
the clockwork chimes as a piano from a barrel-
organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened
in its pristine force. Bruges was no more a hack
neyed rendezvous for cheap trippers and amateur
painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois
and their attendant chaplains. It was the miracu
lous Bruges of which I had dreamed before I had
ever even seen the place — just that.
Having found out where we were in relation to
the Quai Spinola, we folded up the map and went
forward. The carillon ceased, and began again,
reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night
wind. We passed under the shadows of rococo
churches, the f acades and interiors of which are alike
neglected by those who take their pleasures solely
according to the instructions of guide-books, and
finally we emerged out of the maze upon a long
lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake
was set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with
stepwise gables, and by high towers, and by a ring
255

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the lake
floated the Velsa, like the phantom of a ship, too
lovely to be real, and yet real. It was the most
magical thing.
We could scarcely believe that there was our
yacht right in the midst of the town. This was the
same vessel that only a little earlier had rounded
Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage
whatever. Proof enough of the advantage of the
barge-build, with a light draft, and heavy lee-
boards for use with a beam wind when close-hauled.
Some yachtsmen, and expert yachtsmen, too, are
strongly against the barge. But no ordinary yacht
of the Velsa s size could have scraped into that lake
by the Quai Spinola and provided us with that
unique sensation. The Velsa might have been de
signed specially for the background of Bruges.
She fitted it with exquisite perfection.
And the shaft of light slanting up from her fore
castle hatch rendered her more domestic than the
very houses around, which were without exception
dark and blind, and might have been abandoned.
We went gingerly aboard across the narrow, yield
ing gangway, and before turning in gazed again
250

BRUGES
at the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit
that a little way off the kinematograph was tintin-
nabulating for custom, and a Parisian couple sing
ing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked
girls coarsely dancing.

257

PART V
EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES

CHAPTER XVII
EAST ANGLIA
AFTER the exoticism of foreign parts, this
chapter is very English. But no island could
be more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baf
fling than this island. I had a doubt about the
propriety of using the phrase "East Anglia" in the
title. I asked, therefore, three educated people
whether the northern part of Essex could be termed
East Anglia, according to current usage. One
said he didn't know. The next said that East
Anglia began only north of the Stour. The third
said that East Anglia extended southward as far
as anybody considered that it ought to extend
southward. He was a true Englishman. I agreed
with him. England was not made, but born. It
has grown up to a certain extent, and its pleasure
is to be full of anomalies, like a human being. It
has to be seen to be believed.
Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town,
261

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
twelve miles distant. After assessment, particu
lars of it are forwarded to another town in another
county, and the formal demand for payment is
made from there ; but the actual payment has to be
made in a third town, about twenty miles from
either of the other two. What renders England
wondrous is not such phenomena, but the fact that
Englishmen see nothing singular in such phenom
ena. East Anglia, including North Essex, is as Eng
lish as any part of England, and more English
than most. Angles took possession of it very early
in history, and many of their descendants, full of
the original Anglian ideas, still powerfully exist
in the counties. And probably no place is
more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal
yachting center on the east coast, and the home
port of the Velsa. Theoretically and officially,
Harwich is the home port of the Velsa, but not in
practice: we are in England, and it would never
do for the theory to accord with the fact. Bright
lingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea, except at
railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea.
There is some excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
262

4 ri*^

Urt$^

^

I
A FISH-RESTAURANT BOAT
EAST ANGLIA
Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town,
has found 193 different spellings of the name.
Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was "a
member of the Cinque Ports." Not one of the
Cinque Ports, of which characteristically there were
seven, but a member. A "member" was subordi
nate, and Brightlingsea was subordinate to Sand
wich, Heaven knows why. But it shared in the
responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to pro
vide fifty-seven ships for the king's service every
year. In return it shared in the privilege of carry
ing a canopy over the king at the coronation, and
in a few useful exemptions. After it had been a
member of the Cinque for many decades and per
haps even centuries, it began to doubt Whether, after
all, it was a member, and demanded a charter in
proof. This was in 1442. The charter was
granted, and it leads off with these words: "To
all the faithful in Christ, to whom these present
letters shall come, the Mayors and Bailiffs of the
Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting."
By this time ships had already grown rather large.
They carried four masts, of which the aftermost
went by the magnificent title of the "bonaventure
265

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
mizen"; in addition they had a mast with a square
sail at the extremity of the bow-sprit. They also
carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of naviga
tion. Later, smuggling was an important industry at
Brightlingsea, and to suppress it laws were passed
making it illegal to construct fast rowing- or sail
ing-boats. In the same English, and human, way,
it was suggested at the beginning of the twentieth
century that since fast motor-cars kicked up dust
on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable
of traveling fast should be made illegal. There
are no four-masted ships now at Brightlingsea; no
bowsprit carries a mast ; no ship puts to sea with an
astrolabe; the "bonaventure mizen" is no more;
smuggling is unfashionable; fast craft are encour
aged. Nevertheless, on a summer's morning I have left
the Velsa in the dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyth
Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten minutes have
been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a
border of pale grass at the top, and the gray Eng
lish sky overhead, and the whole visible world was
exactly as it must have been when the original
266

EAST ANGLIA
Angles first rowed up that creek. At low water
the entire Christian era is reduced to nothing, in
many a creek of the Colne, the Blackwater, and the
Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been
done ; the pristine reigns as perfectly as in the Afri
can jungle. And the charm of the scene is inde
scribable. But to appreciate it one must know
what to look for. I was telling an Essex friend
of mine about the dreadful flatness of Schleswig-
Holstein. He protested. "But aren't you edu
cated up to flats?" he asked. I said I was. He
persisted. "But are you educated up to mud, the
lovely colors on a mud-flat?" He was a true con
noisseur of Essex. The man who is incapable of
being ravished by a thin, shallow tidal stream run
ning between two wide, shimmering mud banks that
curve through a strictly horizontal marsh, without a
tree, without a shrub, without a bird, save an ec
centric sea-gull, ought not to go yachting in Essex
estuaries. Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oys
ter-fishing, and it catches more sprats than any
other port in the island, namely, about fifteen hun
dred tons of them per annum. But its most spec-
267

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
tacular industry has to do with yachting. It began
to be a yachting resort only yesterday; that is to
say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It has, how
ever, steadily progressed, until now, despite every
natural disadvantage and every negligence, it can
count a hundred and twenty yachts and some eight
hundred men employed therewith. A yacht can
not get into Brightlingsea at all from the high sea
without feeling her way among sand-banks, — in old
days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the inhab
itants made a profitable specialty of salving wrecks,
— and when a yacht has successfully come down
Brightlingsea Reach, which is really the estuary of
the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of
Brightlingsea Creek, her difficulties will multiply.
In the first place, she will always discover that
the mouth of the creek is obstructed by barges at
anchor. She may easily run aground at the mouth,
and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably
will, mistake the channel, and pile herself up on a
bank known as the Cinders, or the Cindery. Far
ther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot
there is no sufficiency of water except at about a
yard and a half from the shore, which has the ap-
268

EAST ANGLIA
pearance of being flat. Escaping all these perils,
she will almost certainly run into something, or
something will run into her, or she may entangle
herself in the oyster preserves. Yachts, barges,
smacks, and floating objects without a name are
anchored anywhere and anyhow. There is no or
der, and no rule, except that a smack always deems
a yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops
her anchor somewhere, and asks for the harbor
master. No harbor-master exists or ever has ex
isted or ever will. Historical tradition — sacred!
All craft do as they like, and the craft with the
thinnest sides must look to its sides.
Also, the creek has no charm whatever of land
scape or seascape. You can see nothing from it
except the httle red streets of Brighthngsea and
the yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some
secret which is uncomprehended beyond England,
it prospers as a center of yachting. Yachts go to
it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but
from choice. Yachts seem to like it. Of course
it is a wonderful place, because any place where a
hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be a
wonderful place. The interest of its creek is inex-
269

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
haustible, once you can reconcile yourself to its
primitive Anglianism, which, after all, really har
monizes rather well with the mud-flats of the
county. An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the
weather eastward is dangerously formidable, you
can turn your back on the North Sea and go for
an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the
Colne is always exciting because you never know
when you may be able to return. Even the Velsa,
which can float on puddles, has gone aground in
the middle of the fair and wide Colne. A few miles
up are the twin villages of Wivenhoe and Row-
hedge, facing each other across the river, both in
ordinately picturesque, and both given up to the
industry of yachting. At Wivenhoe large yachts
and even ships are built, and in winter there is al
ways a choice selection of world-famous yachts on
the mud, costly and huge gewgaws, with their brass
stripped off them, painfully forlorn, stranded in a
purgatory between the paradise of last summer and
the paradise of the summer to come.
If you are adventurous, you keep on winding
along the curved reaches, and as soon as the last
270

EAST ANGLIA
yacht is out of sight, you are thrown back once
more into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing
but a thin, shallow stream, two wide mud banks,
and a border of grass at the top of them. This is
your world, which you share with a sea-gull or a
crow for several miles ; and then suddenly you ar
rive at a concourse of great barges against a quay,
and you wonder by what magic they got there, and
above the quay rise the towers and steeples of a city
that was already ancient when William the Con
queror came to England in the interests of civili
zation to take up the white man's burden, — Col
chester, where more oysters are eaten on a certain
night of the year at a single feast than at any other
feast on earth. Such is the boast.
But such contrasts as the foregoing do not com
pare in violence with the contrasts offered by the
River Stour, a few miles farther north on the map
of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its
mouth, where, in confluence with the River Orwell
(which truly is in East Anglia) it forms a goodish
small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town,
is a fairly important naval port, and also "a gate
of the empire," where steamers go forth for Bel-
271

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
gium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden.
We came into Harwich Harbor on the tide one
magnificent Sunday afternoon, with the sea a
bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and
the entrance to the Stour was guarded by two huge
battle-ships, the Blake and the Blenheim, each ap
parently larger than the whole of the town of Har
wich. Up the Stour, in addition to all the Conti
nental steamers, was moored a fleet of forty or fifty
men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in a quadruple
line. It was necessary for the Velsa to review this
fleet of astoundingly ugly and smart black mon
sters, and she did so, to the high satisfaction of the
fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of Sunday
afternoon was thirsting for a distraction, even the
mildest. On every sinister ship — the Basilisk, the
Harpy, etc., apposite names! — the young blue
jackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were
trying bravely to amuse themselves. The sound
of the jews'-harp and of the concertina was heard,
and melancholy songs of love. Little circles of
men squatted here and there on the machinery-en
cumbered decks playing at some game. A few
students were reading; some athletes were spar-
272

BRIGHTLINGSEA CRERK

EAST ANGLIA
ring; many others skylarking. None was too busy
to stare at our strange lines. Launches and long
boats were flitting about full of young men, going
on leave to the ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or
sadly returning therefrom. Every sound and
noise was clearly distinguishable in the stillness of
the hot afternoon. And the impression given by
the fleet as a whole was that of a vast masculine
town, for not a woman could be descried anywhere.
It was striking and mournful. When we had got
to the end of the fleet I had a wild idea :
"Let us go up the Stour."
At half -flood it looked a noble stream at least
half a mile wide, and pointing west in an almost
perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever had
been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The
skipper said it was a ticklish stream, but he was
always ready for an escapade. We proceeded.
Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a mo
ment, as it seemed, we had quitted civilization and
the latest machinery and mankind, and were back
in the Anglian period. River marshes, and dis
tant wooded hills, that was all; not even a tilled
field in sight! The river showed small headlands,
275

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent
buoys indicated that a channel existed, but whether
they were starboard or port buoys nobody could
tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon
there were no buoys, and we slowed down the en
gine in apprehension, for on the wide, deceptive
waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We
dared not put about, we dared not go ahead.
Astern, on the horizon, was the distant fleet, in an
other world. Ahead, on the horizon, was a hint of
the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a
rowboat approached mysteriously out of one of
those bights, and it was manned by two men with
the air of conspirators.
"D'ye want a pilot?"
We hardened ourselves.
"No."They rowed round us, critically staring, and re
ceded. "Why in thunder is n't this river buoyed?" I de
manded of the skipper.
The skipper answered that the intention obvi
ously was to avoid taking the bread out of the
mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No ca-
276

EAST ANGLIA
tastrophe. The town of Mistley approached us.
Then we had to pause again, reversing the propel
ler. We were in a network of shallows. Far to
port could be seen a small red buoy; it was almost
on the bank. Impossible that it could indicate the
true channel. We went straight ahead and
chanced it. The next instant we were hard on the
mud in midstream, and the propeller was making
a terrific pother astern. We could only wait for
the tide to float us off. The rowboat appeared
again. "D'ye want a pilot?"
"No."
And it disappeared.
When we floated, the skipper said to me in a pe
culiar challenging tone:
"Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?"
"We '11 go on," I said. I could say no less.
We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure
enough, the true channel was there, right under the
south bank. And we came safely to the town of
Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even
a torpedo-boat and seldom indeed a yacht, certainly
never a Velsa. And yet the smoke of the harbor
277

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique
quay. The town of Mistley rose from its secular
slumber to enjoy a unique sensation that after
noon. "Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?" said the
skipper, adding with a grin, "There 's only about
half an hour left of the flood, and if we get aground
again — "
It was another challenge.
"Yes," I said.
Manningtree is a town even more recondite than
Mistley, and it marks the very end of the navigable
waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the next
corner. We thought we could detect the channel,
curving out again now into midstream. We fol
lowed the lure, opened out Manningtree the de
sired — and went on the mud with a most percepti
ble bump. Out, quick, with the dinghy! Cover
her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and lower
an anchor therein and about fifty fathoms of chain,
and row away! We manned the windlass, and
dragged the Velsa off the mud.
"Shall we go on, sir?"
"No," I said, not a hero. "We '11 give up Man-
278

EAST ANGLIA
ningtree this trip." Obstinacy in adventure might
have meant twelve hours in the mud. The crew
breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to
civihzation. We knew now why the Stour is a des
olate stream. Thus to this day I have never
reached Manningtree except in an automobile.
And there are still stranger waters than the
Stour; for example, Hamford Water, where ex
plosives are manufactured on lonely marshes,
where immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks
and owls intermingle, and pubhc-houses with no
public linger on from century to century, and
where the saltings are greener than anywhere else
on the coast, and the east wind more east, and the
mud more vivid. And the Velsa has been there,
too.

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CHAPTER XVIII
IN SUFFOLK
THE Orwell is reputed to have the finest estu
ary in East Anglia. It is a broad stream,
and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines
of destruction have been left behind, it begins to be
humane and reassuring. Thanks to the surprising
modernity of the town of Ipswich, which has dis
covered that there are interests more important
than those of local pilots, it is thoroughly well
buoyed, so that the stranger and the amateur can
not fail to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself
into Suffolk in soft and civilized curves, and dis
plays no wildness of any kind and, except at one
point, very little mud. When you are navigating
the Orwell, you know positively that you are in
England. On each side of you modest but grace
fully wooded hills slope down with caution to the
bank, and you have glimpses of magnificent man-
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IN SUFFOLK
sions set in the midst of vast, undulating parks,
crisscrossed with perfectly graveled paths that
gleam in the sunshine. Everything here is private
and sacred, and at the gates of the park lodge-
keepers guard not only the paradisiacal acres, but
the original ideas that brought the estate into ex
istence. Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes
with calm confidence in itself; and even on your
yacht's deck you can feel it, and you are awed.
For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous
cohesive force. And it is a solemn thought that
within a mile of you may be a hushed drawing-
room at whose doors the notion of democracy has
been knocking quite in vain for a hundred years.
Presently you will hear the sweet and solemn
chimes of a tower-clock, sound which seems to
spread peace and somnolence over half a county.
And as you listen, you cannot but be convinced
that the feudal world is august and beautiful, and
that it cannot be improved, and that to overthrow
it would be a vandalism. That is the estuary of
the Orwell and its influence. Your pleasure in it
will be unalloyed unless you are so ill-advised as to
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
pull off in the dinghy, and try to land in one of
the lovely demesnes.
About half-way up the estuary, just after pass
ing several big three-masters moored in midstream
and unloading into lighters, you come to Pinmill,
renowned among yachtsmen and among painters.
Its haven is formed out of the angle of a bend in
the river, and the narrowness of the channel at this
point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to the
yachts at anchor. Here are all manner of yachts,
and you are fairly certain to see a friend, and pay
or receive a visit of state. And also very probably,
if you are on board the Velsa, some painter on an
other yacht will feel bound to put your strange
craft into a sketch. And the skipper, who has ht
tle partiality for these river scenes, will take the
opportunity to go somewhere else on a bicycle.
You, too, must go ashore, because Pinmill is an
exhibition- village, entirely picturesque, paintable,
and Enghsh. It is liable to send the foreigner into
raptures, and Americans have been known to as
sert that they could exist there in happiness forever
and ever.
I believe that some person or persons in author-
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IN SUFFOLK
ity offer prizes to the peasantry for the prettiest
cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but I
should like to see in every picturesque and paint-
able Enghsh village a placard stating the number
of happy peasants who sleep more than three in a
room, and the number of adult able-bodied males
who earn less than threepence an hour. All as
pects of the admirable feudal system ought to be
made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-
clock speak loud, and need no advertisement; cot
tage gardens also insist on the traveler's attention,
but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.
The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually
decide to remain there over night. In one respect
this is a mistake, for the company of yachts is such
that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck
attract an audience, which produces self -conscious
ness in the exerciser.
Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and
Ipswich is a genuine town that combines industrial
ism with the historic sense. No American can af
ford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a no
torious connection with Mr. Pickwick, and was
reproduced entire and life-size at a world's fair in
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
the United States. Aware of this important fact,
the second-hand furniture and curio-dealers of the
town have adopted suitable measures. When they
have finished collecting, Americans should go to
the docks — as interesting as anything in Ipswich —
and see the old custom-house, with its arch, and the
gloriously romantic French and Scandinavian
three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the
principal basin. Times change. Less than eighty
years ago the docks of Ipswich were larger than
those of London. And there are men ahve and
fighting in Ipswich to-day who are determined that
as a port Ipswich shall resume something of her
ancient position in the world.
Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary,
northward, is the estuary of the River Deben. One
evening, feeling the need of a httle ocean air after
the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down
therefrom to the North Sea, and finding ourselves
off Woodbridgehaven, which is at the mouth of the
Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined
to risk the entrance. According to all printed ad
vice, the entrance ought not to be risked without
local aid. There is a bank at the mouth, with a
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IN SUFFOLK
patch that dries at low water, and within there is
another bank. The shoals shift pretty frequently,
and, worst of all, the tide runs at the rate of six
knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and
the flood only two hours old. We followed the
sailing directions, and got in without trouble just
as night fell. The rip of the tide was very
marked, and the coast-guard who boarded us with
a coast-guard's usual curiosity looked at us as
though we were either heroes or rash fools, proba
bly the latter.
We dropped anchor for the night, and the next
morning explored the estuary, with the tide rising.
We soon decided that the perils of this famous
river had been exaggerated. There were plenty
of beacons, — which, by the way, are continually
being shifted as the shoals shift, — and moreover
the channel defined itself quite simply, for the rea
son that the rest of the winding river-bed was dry.
We arrived proudly at Woodbridge, drawing all
the maritime part of the town to look at us, and we
ourselves looked at Woodbridge in a fitting man
ner, for it is sacred to the memory not of Omar
Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
Fitzgerald, who well knew the idiosyncrasies of the
Deben. Then it was necessary for us to return,
as only for about two hours at each tide is there
sufficient water for a yacht to he at Woodbridge.
The exit from the Deben was a different affair
from the incoming. Instead of a clearly defined
channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The bea
cons or perches were still poking up their heads, of
course, but they were of no use, since they had
nothing to indicate whether they were starboard
or port beacons. It is such details that harmonize
well with the Old- World air of English estuaries
— with the swans, for instance, those eighteenth-
century birds that abound on the Deben. We had
to take our choice of port or starboard. Heaven
guided us. We reached the entrance. The tide
was at half -ebb and running like a race; the
weather was unreliable. It was folly to proceed.
We proceeded. We had got in alone; we would
get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who
bawled after us. We put the two beacons in a line
astern, obedient to the sailing directions; but we
could not keep them in a line. The tide swirled us
away, making naught of the engine. We gave a
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IN SUFFOLK
tremendous bump. Yes, we were assuredly on the
bank for at least ten hours, if not forever ; if it came
on to blow, we might well be wrecked. But no.
The ancient Velsa seemed to rebound elastically off
the traitorous sand, and we were afloat again. In
two minutes more we were safe. What the coast
guard said is not known to this day. We felt se
cretly ashamed of our foolishness, but we were sus
tained by the satisfaction of having deprived more
local pilots of their fees.
Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the
next river-mouth northward — Orford Haven — we
yielded to a base common sense, and signaled for a
pilot. The river Ore is more dangerous to enter,
and far more peculiar even than the Deben. The
desolate spot, where it runs into the sea is well
called Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shin
gles. The tide runs very fast indeed ; the bar shifts
after every gale, and not more than four feet of
water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the
bottom is hard. It was probably the hardness of
the bottom that finally induced us to stoop to a
pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to run
aground on anything of a rocky nature may be
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
fatal. Our signal was simply ignored. Not the
slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We were
creeping in, and we continued to creep in. The
skipper sent the deck-hand forward with the pole.
He called out seven feet, eight feet, seven feet ; but
these were Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, be
cause the pole is a Dutch pole. The water was
ominous, full of curling crests and unpleasant hol
lows, as the wind fought the current. The deck
hand called out seven, six, five and a half. We
could almost feel the ship bump . . . and then we
were over the bar. Needless to say that a pilot
immediately hove in sight. We waved him off,
though he was an old man with a grievance.
We approached the narrows. We had con
quered the worst difficulties by the sole help of the
skipper's instinct for a channel, for the beacons
were incomprehensible to us ; and we imagined that
we could get through the narrows into the river
proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair
wind, and we set all sails, and the engine was work
ing well; but there was more than a six-knot tide
rushing out through those narrows, and we could
not get through. We hung in them for about half
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IN SUFFOLK
an hour. Then, imitating the example of a fisher
man who had followed us, we just ran her nose into
the shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped
ashore with a rope. The opportunity to paint a
water-color of the Velsa under full sail was not to
be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed
knowledge from the fisherman. He informed us
that we had not entered by the channel at all ; that
we were never anywhere near it. He said that the
channel had four feet at that hour. Thus we
learned that local wisdom is not always omnis
cience. After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore
on the slack. The Ore is a very dull river, but it
has the pleasing singularity of refusing to quit the
ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel
with the North Sea, separated from it only by a
narrow strip of shingle. Under another name it
all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh, where at
length it curves inland. On its banks is Orford, a
town more dead than any dead city of the Zuyder
Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of charac
ter. The deadness of Orford may be estimated
from the fact that it can support a kinematograph
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
only three nights a week. It has electric light, but
no railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty
castle, a fine church, an antique quay, and a large
supply of splendid lobsters. It knows not the
tourist, and has the air of a natural self -preserving
museum.

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IN THE ESTUARY

CHAPTER XIX
THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
TIME was when I agreed with the popular,
and the guide-book, verdict that the Orwell
is the finest estuary in these parts ; but now that I
know it better, I unhesitatingly give the palm to
the Blackwater. It is a nobler stream, a true arm
of the sea; its moods are more various, its banks
wilder, and its atmospheric effects much grander.
The defect of it is that it does not gracefully curve.
The season for cruising on the Blackwater is Sep
tember, when the village regattas take place, and
the sunrises over leagues of marsh are made won
derful by strange mists.
Last September the Velsa came early into
Mersea Quarters for Mersea Regatta. The
Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek
that is sheltered betwen the mainland and
Mersea Island — which is an island only dur
ing certain hours of the day. Crowds of small
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
yachts have their home in the Quarters, and
the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley of
craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through
five-tonners to fishing-smacks, trading-barges con
verted into barge-yachts, real barge-yachts like
ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred
tons or so, fully "dressed," and carrying ladies in
bright-colored jerseys, to preside over all. The
principal events occur in the estuary, but the inti
mate and amusing events, together with all the
river gossip and scandal, are reserved for the seclu
sion of the Quarters, where a long lane of boats
watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for
the tide to cover the illimitable mud, and hsten to
the excessively primitive band which has stationed
itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
We managed to get on the mud, but we did that
on purpose, to save the trouble of anchoring.
Many yachts and even smacks do it not on pur
pose, and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A
genuine yachtsman paid us a visit — one of those
men who live solely for yachting, who sail their
own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to
dress like a sailor before the mast or like a long-
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THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
shore loafer — and told us a tale of an amateur who
had bought a yacht that had inhabited Mersea
Quarters all her life. When the amateur returned
from his first cruise in her, he lost his nerve at the
entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a fisherman
at anchor in a dinghy, "Which is the channel?"
The fisherman, seeing a yacht whose lines had been
familiar to him for twenty years, imagined that he
was being made fun of. He drawled out, "You
know." In response to appeals more and more ex
cited he continued to drawl out, "You know." At
length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon
he drawlingly advised: "Let the old wench alone.
Let her alone. She '11 find her way in all right."
Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal stories,
because the time has to be passed somehow while
the water rises. There was a tale of a smuggler
on the mud-flats, pursued in the dead of night by a
coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler
turned round to face the coast-guardsman. "Look
here," said he to the coast-guardsman with warning
persuasiveness, "you 'd better not come any further.
You do see such wonderful queer things in the
newspapers nowadays." The coast-guardsman,
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FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark say
ing, accepted the advice, and went home.
The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin
to go off, and presently the regatta is in full activ
ity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with white,
and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter
within the lane of boats in the Quarters is terrific.
In these affairs, at a given moment in the after
noon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy
events are finished, and before the yachts and
smacks competing in the long races have come
back. During this pause we escaped out of the
Quarters, and proceeded up the river, past Brad-
well Creek, where Thames barges he, and past
Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide
was still slack. We could not reach Maldon,
which is the Mecca of the Blackwater, and we an
chored a few miles below that municipal survival,
in the wildest part of the river, and watched the
sun disappear over vast, flat expanses of water as
smooth as oil, with low banks whose distances were
enormously enhanced by the customary optical
delusions of English weather. Close to us was
Osea Island, where an establishment for the ref-
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LEAVING MALDON

THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
ormation of drunkards adds to the weird scene
an artistic touch of the sinister. From the private
jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in process of
being reformed gazed at us steadily in the deep
ening gloom. Then an attendant came down the
jetty and lighted its solitary red eye, which joined
its stare to that of the inebriates.
Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head
of the Blackwater, is the pearl. Its situation on
a hill, with a fine tidal lake in front of it, is superb,
and the strange thing in its history is that it should
not have been honored by the brush of Turner. A
thoroughly bad railway service has left Maldon
in the eighteenth century for the delight of
yachtsmen who are content to see a town de
cay if only the spectacle affords esthetic pleas
ure. There is a lock in the river just below Maldon,
leading to the Chelmsford Canal. We used this
lock, and found a lock-keeper and lock-house
steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Be
yond the lock was a basin in which were hidden
two beautiful Scandinavian schooners discharging
timber and all the romance of the North. The
301

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage
on the canal, at any rate as far as the next lock,
and we asked the lock-keeper how far off the next
lock was. He said curtly:
"Ye can't go up to the next lock."
"Why not?"
"Because there 's only two feet of water in this
canal. There never was any more."
We animadverted upon the absurdity of a com
mercial canal, leading to a county town, having
a depth of only two feet.
He sharply defended his canal.
"Well," he ended caustically, "it 's been going
on now for a hundred or a hundred and twenty
year like that, and I think it may last another day
er two."
We had forgotten that we were within the in
fluences of Maldon, and we apologized.
Later — it was a Sunday of glorious weather —
we rowed in the dinghy through the tidal lake into
the town. The leisured population of Maldon was
afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few
boats were flitting about. The sole organized
amusement was public excursions in open sailing-
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THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the
day being Sunday and the weather hot and every
body anxious to bathe, the place was naturally
closed. There ought to have been an open-air con
cert, but there was not. Upon this scene of a
population endeavoring not to be bored, the ancient
borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its
church-topped hill.
Amid the waterways of the town were spacious
timber-yards ; and eighteenth-century wharves with
wharfinger's residence all complete, as in the an
tique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces;
plenty of barges; and one steamer. We thought
of Sneek, the restless and indefatigable. I have
not yet visited in the Velsa any Continental port
that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the
East Anglian estuaries together I have so far
seen only one motor-barge, and that was at Har
wich. English bargemen no doubt find it more
dignified to lie in wait for a wind than to go puff
ing to and fro regardless of wind. Assuredly a
Thames barge — said to be the largest craft in the
world sailed by a man and a boy — in full course
on the Blackwater is a noble vision full of beauty,
303

FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
but it does not utter the final word of enterprise
in transport.
The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly
down the river in company with a fleet of fishing-
smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The
distances seemed enormous. The faintest south
east breeze stirred the atmosphere, but not the mir
ror of the water. All the tints of the pearl were
mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect
anywhere that was not flawlessly beautiful, en
chanted with expectation of the day. The un
measured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they
must have steamed two thousand years ago, and
herons stood sentry on them as they must have
stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure
glittering white, a sea-gull! The whole picture
was ideal.
At seven o'clock we had reached Goldhanger
Creek, beset with curving water-weeds. And the
creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the
mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth.
A boat sailed in, scarcely moving, scarcely rippling
the water, and it was in charge of two old white-
haired fishermen. They greeted me.
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THROUGH THE MEADOWS

THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
"Is this creek long?" I asked. A pause. They
both gazed at the creek with the beautiful name,
into which they were sailing, as though they had
never seen it before.
"Aye, it 's long."
"How long is it? Is it a mile?"
"Aye, it 's a mile."
"Is there anything up there?" Another pause.
The boat was drawing away from me.
"Aye, there 's oysters up there." The boat
and the men withdrew imperceptibly into the
silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below,
at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress
for another village regatta; and an ineffable mel
ancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme beauty
of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and
this our last cruise, of the season.

THE END

307