Produced by David Widger from page images generously provided by the Internet Archive FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA By Arnold Bennett Pictures By E. A. Rickards And A Frontispiece By The Author New York: The Century Co. 1914 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0008] [Illustration: 0009] FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA PART I HOLLAND 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 pictured for me as a paradise where a yacht with a seventy-foot mast never had to wait a single moment for a bridge to be swung open. When I inquired about custom-house formalities, I learned that a Dutch custom-house did not exist for a craft flying the sacred blue ensign of the British Naval Reserve. And it was so. Merely depositing a ticket and a tip into the long-handled butterfly-net dangled over our deck by the bridge-man as we passed, we sailed straight into Holland, and no word said! But we knew immediately that we were in another country--a country cleaner and neater and more garnished even than Belgium. The Terneuzen Canal, with its brickwork banks and its villages âfinishedâ to the last tile, reminded me of the extravagant, oily perfection of the main tracks of those dandiacal railroads, the North Western in England and the Pennsylvania in America. The stiff sailing breeze was at length favorable. We set the mainsail unexceptionably; and at once, with the falling dusk, the wind fell, and the rain too. We had to depend again on our erratic motor, with all Holland gazing at us. Suddenly the whole canal was lit up on both sides by electricity. We responded with our lights. The exceedingly heavy rain drove me into the saloon to read Dostoyevsky. [Illustration: 0019] At eight P. M. I was dug up out of the depths of Dostoyevsky in order to see my first Dutch harbor. Rain poured through the black night. There was a plashing of invisible wavelets below, utter darkness above, and a few forlorn lights winking at vast distances. I was informed that we were moored in the yacht-basin of Terneuzen. I remained calm. Had we been moored in the yacht-basin of Kamchatka, the smell of dinner would still have been issuing from the forecastle-hatch, the open page of Dostoyevsky would still have invited me through the saloon skylight, and the amiable ray of the saloon lamp would still have glinted on the piano and on the binnacle with impartial affection. Herein lies an advantage of yachting over motoring. I redescended without a regret, without an apprehension. Already the cook was displacing Dostoyevsky in favor of a white table-cloth and cutlery. The next morning we were at large on the billowâs of the West Schelde, a majestic and enraged stream, of which Flushing is the guardian and Antwerp the mistress. The rain had in no wise lost heart. With a contrary wind and a choppy sea, the yacht had a chance to show her qualities and defects. She has both. Built to the order of a Dutch baron rather less than twenty years ago, she is flat-bottomed, with lee-boards, and follows closely the lines of certain very picturesque Dutch fishing-smacks. She has a length of just over fifty-five feet and a beam of just over fifteen feet. Her tonnage is fifty-one, except when dues have to be paid, on which serious occasions it mysteriously shrinks to twenty-one net. Yachtsmen are always thus modest. Her rig is, roughly, that of a cutter, with a deliciously curved gaff that is the secret envy of all real cutters. Her supreme advantage, from my point of view, is that she has well over six feet of head-room in the saloon and in the sleeping-cabins. And, next, that the ownerâs bed is precisely similar to the celestial bed which he enjoyed on a certain unsurpassed American liner. Further, she carries a piano and an encyclopedia, two necessaries of life. I may say that I have never known another yacht that carried an encyclopedia in more than a score of volumes. Again, she is eternal. She has timbers that recall those of the _Constitution_. There are Dutch eel-boats on the Thames which look almost exactly like her at a distance, and which were launched before Victoria came to the throne. She has a cockpit in which Hardy might have kissed Nelson. She sails admirably with a moderate wind on the quarter. More important still, by far, she draws only three feet eight inches, and hence can often defy charts, and slide over sands where deep-draft boats would rightly fear to tread; she has even been known to sail through fields. Possibly for some folk her chief attribute would be that, once seen, she cannot be forgotten. She is a lovely object, and not less unusual than lovely. She is smart also, but nothing more dissimilar to the average smart, conventional English or American yacht can well be conceived. She is a magnet for the curious. When she goes under a railway bridge while a train is going over it, the engine-driver, of no matter what nationality, will invariably risk the lives of all his passengers in order to stare at her until she is out of sight. This I have noticed again and again. The finest compliment her appearance ever received was paid by a schoolboy, who, after staring at her for about a quarter of an hour as she lay at a wharf at Kingston-on-Thames, sidled timidly up to me as I leaned in my best maritime style over the quarter, and asked, âPlease, sir, is this a training brig?â Romance gleamed in that boyâs 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 âpace,â 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 âone mile ahead and two miles to leewardâ; but he would be hurt if he were taken seriously. Her worst fault is due to her long, overhanging prow, which pounds into a head sea with a ruthlessness that would shake the funnels off a torpedo-boat. You must not press her. Leave her to do her best, and she will do it splendidly; but try to bully her, and she will bury her nose and defy you. That morning on the wide, broad Schelde, with driving rain, and an ever-freshening northwester worrying her bows, she was not pressed, and she did not sink; but her fierce gaiety was such as to keep us all alive. She threshed the sea. The weather multiplied, until the half-inch wire rope that is the nerve between the wheel and the rudder snapped, and we were at the mercy, etc. While the skipper, with marvelous resource and rapidity, was improvising a new gear, it was discovered amid general horror, that the piano had escaped from its captivity, and was lying across the saloon table. Such an incident counts in the life of an amateur musician. Still, under two hours later, I was playing the same piano again in the tranquillity of Flushing lock. [Illustration: 0026] It was at Middelburg that the leak proved its existence. Middelburg is an architecturally delightful town even in heavy, persevering rain and a northwest gale. It lies on the canal from Flushing to Veere, and its belfry had been a beacon to us nearly all the way down the Schelde from Temeuzen. Every English traveler stares at its renowned town-hall; and indeed the whole place, having been till recently the haunt of more or less honest English racing tipsters and book-makers, must be endeared to the British sporting character. We went forth into the rain and into the town, skirting canals covered with timber-rafts, suffering the lively brutishness of Dutch infants, and gazing at the bare-armed young women under their umbrellas. We also found a goodish restaurant. When we returned at nine P. M., the deck-hand, a fatalistic philosopher, was pumping. He made a sinister figure in the dark. And there was the sound of the rain on our umbrellas, and the sound of the pumped water pouring off our decks down into the unseen canal. I asked him why he was pumping at that hour. He answered that the ship leaked. It did. The forecastle floor was under an inch of water, and water was pushing up the carpet of the starboard sleeping-cabin, and all the clean linen in the linen-locker was drenched. In a miraculous and terrifying vision, which changed the whole aspect of yachting as a recreation, I saw the yacht at the bottom of the canal. I should not have had this vision had the skipper been aboard; but the skipper was ashore, unfolding the beauties of Holland to the cook. I knew the skipper would explain and cure the leak in an instant. A remarkable man, Dutch only by the accident of birth and parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable as a camel, adventurous as Columbus, and as prudent as J. Pierpont Morgan, he had never failed me. Half his life had been spent on that yacht, and the other half on the paternal barge. He had never lived regularly in a house. Consequently he was an expert of the very first order on the behavior of Dutch barges under all conceivable conditions. While the ship deliberately sank and sank, the pumping monotonously continued, and I waited in the saloon for him to come back. Dostoyevsky had no hold on me whatever. The skipper would not come back: he declined utterly to come back; he was lost in the mazy vastness of Middelburg. Then I heard his voice forward. He had arrived in silence. âI hear our little ship has got a leak, sir,â he said when I joined the group of professional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick rain that veiled even gas-lamps. I was disappointed. The skipper was depressed, sentimentally depressed, and he was quite at a loss. Was the leak caused by the buffetings of the Schelde, by the caprices of the piano, by the stress of working through crowded locks? He knew not. But he would swear that the leak was not in the bottom, because the bottom was double. The one thing to do was to go to Veere, and put the ship on a grid that he was aware of in the creek there, and find the leak. And, further, there were a lot of other matters needing immediate attention. The bob-stay was all to pieces, both pumps were defective, and the horn for rousing lethargic bridge-men would not have roused a rabbit. All which meant for him an expedition to Flushing, that bustling port! The ship was pumped dry. But the linen was not dry. I wanted to spread it out in the saloon; but the skipper would not permit such an outrage on the sanctity of the saloon, he would not even let the linen rest in the saloon lavatory (sometimes called the bath-room). It must be hidden like a shame in the forecastle. So the crew retired for the night to the sodden, small forecastle amid soaked linen, while I reposed in dry and comfortable spaciousness, but worried by those sociological considerations which are the mosquitos of a luxurious age--and which ought to be. None but a tyrant convinced of the divine rights of riches could be always at ease on board a small yacht; on board a large one, as in a house, the contrasts are less point-blank. And yet must small yachts he abolished? Absurd idea! Civilization is not so simple an affair as it seems to politicians perorating before immense audiences. Owing to the obstinacy of water in finding its own level, we went to bed more than once during that night, and I thought of selling the ship and giving to the poor. What a declension from the glory of the original embarkation! The next afternoon, through tempests and an eternal downpour, we reached Veere, at the other end of the canal. Veere is full of Scotch history and of beauty; it has a cathedral whose interior is used by children as a field, a gem of a town-hall, and various attractions less striking; but for us it existed simply as a place where there was a grid, to serve the purpose of a dry-dock. On the following morning we got the yacht onto the grid, and then began to wait for the tide to recede. During its interminable recession, we sat under a shed of the shipyard, partly sheltered from the constant rain, and labored to produce abominable watercolors of the yacht, with the quay and the cathedral and the town-hall as a background. And then some one paddling around the yacht in the dinghy perceived a trickle out of a seam. The leak! It was naught but the slight starting of a seam! No trace of other damage. In an hour it had been repaired with oakum and hammers, and covered with a plaster of copper. The steering-gear was repaired. The pumps were repaired. The bobstay was repaired. The water-color looked less abominable in the discreet, kindly light of the saloon. The state of human society seemed less volcanically dangerous. God was in His heaven. âI suppose youâd like to start early to-morrow morning, sir,â said the skipper, whose one desire in life is to go somewhere else. I said I should. I went ashore with the skipper to pay bills--four gulden for repairs and three gulden for the use of the grid. It would have been much more but for my sagacity in having a Dutch skipper. The charming village proved to be virtually in the possession of one of those formidable English families whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-course is near. They ran ecstatically about the quay with sheets of Whatman until the heavy rain melted them. The owner of the grid lived in a large house with a most picturesque faÃ§ade. Inside it was all oilcloth, red mahogany, and crimson plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright was an old, jolly man, with white whiskers spreading like a peacockâs tail. He gave us cigars to pass the time while he accomplished the calligraphy of a receipt. He was a man sarcastic about his women (of whom he had many), because they would not let him use the _voor-kammer_ (front room) to write receipts in. I said women were often the same in England, and he gave a short laugh at England. Nevertheless, he was proud of his women, because out of six daughters five had found husbands, a feat of high skill in that island of Walcheren, where women far outnumber men. Outside, through the mullioned window, I saw a young matron standing nonchalant and unprotected in the heavy rain. She wore an elaborate local costume, with profuse gilt ornaments. The effect of these Dutch costumes is to suggest that the wearer carries only one bodice, thin and armless, but ten thousand skirts. Near the young matron was a girl of seven or eight, dressed in a fashion precisely similar, spectacle exquisite to regard, but unsatisfactory to think about. Some day all these women will put on long sleeves and deprive themselves of a few underskirts, and all the old, jolly men with spreading white beards will cry out that women are unsexed and that the end of the world is nigh. In another house I bought a fishermanâs knitted blue jersey of the finest quality, as being the sole garment capable of keeping me warm in a Dutch summer. I was told that the girl who knitted it received only half a gulden for her labor. Outrageous sweating, which ought never to have been countenanced. Still, I bought the jersey. At six-thirty next day we were under way--a new ship, as it seemed to me. Yachts may have leaks, but we were under way, and the heavenly smell of bacon was in the saloon; and there had been no poring over time-tables, no tipping of waiters, no rattling over cobbles in omnibuses, no waiting in arctic railway-stations, no pugnacity for corner seats, no checking of baggage. I was wakened by the vibration of the propeller; I clad myself in a toga, and issued forth to laugh good-by at sleeping Veere--no other formalities. And all along the quay, here and there, I observed an open window among the closed ones. Each open window denoted for me an English water-colorist sleeping, even as she or he had rushed about the quay, with an unconcealed conviction of spiritual, moral, and physical superiority. It appeared to me monstrous that these English should be so ill bred as to inflict their insular notions about fresh air on a historic Continental town. Every open window was an arrogant sneer at Dutch civilization, was it not? Surely they could have slept with their windows closed for a few weeks! Or, if not, they might have chosen Amsterdam instead of Veere, and practised their admirable Englishness on the âVictorian Tea-Roomâ in that city. [Illustration: 0035] We passed into the Veeregat and so into the broad Roompot Channel, and left Veere. It was raining heavily, but gleams near the horizon allowed me to hope that before the day was out I might do another water-color. CHAPTER II--DUTCH LEISURE EVERY tourist knows that Holland is one of the historic cradles of political freedom, and also a chain of cities which are in effect museums of invaluable art. The voyager in a little ship may learn that in addition to all this Holland is the home of a vast number of plain persons who are under the necessity of keeping themselves alive seven days a week, and whose experiments in the adventure of living have an interest quite equal to the interest of ancient art. To judge that adventure in its final aspect, one should see Holland on a Sunday, and not the Holland of the cities, but of the little towns. We came one Sunday morning to a place called Zieriksee, on an island to the north of the East Schelde. Who has heard of Zieriksee? Nevertheless, Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people prosecute the adventure therein without the aid of museums and tourists. At first, from the mouth of its private canal, it seems to be a huge, gray tower surrounded by tiniest dollâs-houses with vermilion roofs; and as you approach, the tower waxes, until the stones of it appear sufficient to build the whole borough; then it wanes, and is lost in the town, as all towers ultimately are. The cobbled quay and streets were empty as we moored. And in an instant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth,--men and boys and girls, but few women,--staring, glaring, giggling, gabbling, pushing. Their inquisitiveness had no shame, no urbanity. Their cackle deafened. They worried the _Velsa_ like starving wolves worrying a deer. The _Velsa_ was a godsend, unhoped for in the enormous and cruel tedium which they had created for themselves. To escape them we forced our way ashore, and trod the clean, deathlike, feet-torturing streets. One shop was open; we entered it, and were supplied with cigarettes by two polite and gracious very old women who knew no English. On emerging from this paganism, we met a long, slow-slouching, gloomy procession of sardonic human beings,--not a pretty woman among them, not a garment that was comely or unclean or unrespectable, not a smile,--the great, faithful congregation marching out of the great church. Here was the life of leisure in Holland as distinguished from the week-day life of industry. It was a tragic spectacle. When we returned to the yacht, the other congregation was still around it. And it was still there, just as noisy and boorish, when we left several hours later. And it would still have been there if we had remained till midnight. The phenomenon of that crowd, wistful in its touching desire for distraction, was a serious criticism of the leaders of men in Holland. As we slid away, we could see the crowd rapidly dissolving into the horror of its original ennui. I asked the cook, a cockney, what he thought of Zieriksee. His face lightened to a cheerful smile. âRather a nice sort of place, sir. More like England.â [Illustration: 0040] The same afternoon we worked up the Schelde in a dead calm to Zijpe. The rain had pretermitted for the first time, and the sun was hot. Zijpe is a village, a haven, a dike, and a junction of train and steamer. The village lies about a mile inland. The haven was pretty full of barges laid up for Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the railway-station and the landing-stage, a multitude of at least a thousand people were strolling to and fro or sitting on the wet grass, all in their formidable Sabbath best. We joined them, in order, if possible, to learn the cause of the concourse; but the mystery remained for one hour and a half in the eventless expanse of the hot afternoon, when the train came in over the flat, green leagues of landscape. We then understood. The whole of Zijpe had turned out to see the afternoon train come in! It was a simple modest Dutch local train, making a deal of noise and dust, and bearing perhaps a score of passengers. But it marked the grand climacteric of leisured existence at Zijpe. We set off to the village, and discovered a village deserted, and a fair-ground, with all its booths and circuses swathed up in gray sheeting. Scarcely a soul! The spirit of romance had pricked them all to the railway-station to see the train come in! Making a large circuit, we reached again the river and the dike, and learned what a dike is in Holland. From the top of it we could look down the chimneys of houses on the landward side. The population was now on the dike, promenading in magnificent solemnity and self-control. Everybody gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely saluted everybody, and had not a moment to ourselves for miles. âOver there,â said the skipper afterward, pointing vaguely to the southeast over the Schelde, âthey âre Roman Catholics. There âs a lot of Spaniards left in Holland.â By Spaniards he meant Dutchmen with some Spanish blood. âThen they enjoy their Sundays?â I suggested. âYes,â he answered sarcastically, âthey 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 cafÃ©, and play high, and as like as not knife each other before they âve done.â Clearly it takes all sorts to make a little world like Holland, and it is difficult to strike the mean between absolute nullity and homicidal knives. My regret is that the yacht never got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing in cafÃ©s. On Monday morning every skipper on every river and canal of Holland tries to prove that the stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion. The East Schelde hummed with express barges at five A. M. It was exactly like a Dutch picture by an old master. Even we, in no hurry, with a strong tide under us and a rising northwester behind us, accomplished fifteen sea-miles in ninety minutes. Craft were taking shelter from the threatened gale. In spite of mistakes by an English crew unaccustomed to a heavy mainsail in tortuous navigation and obstreperous weather, we reached Dordrecht railway bridge without public shame; and then the skipper decided that our engine could not be trusted to push us through the narrow aperture against wind and tide. Hence we bargained with a tug, and were presently attached thereto, waiting for the bridge to open. Considering that Holland is a country where yachts are understood, and where swing-bridges open at a glance, we had to wait some little time for that bridge; namely, three hours. The patriotism of the skipper was strained. During the whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us wildly about like a kettle at the tail of a busy dog, and continuously collecting other kettles, so that our existence was one long shock and collision. But we saw a good deal of home life on the barges, from a minor barge which a girl will steer to the three-thousand-ton affair that surpasses mail steamers in capacity. [Illustration: 0045] There are two homes on these monsters, one at the stem and the other at the stern; the latter is frequently magnificent in spaciousness and gilding. That the two families in the two distant homes are ever intimate is impossible, that they are even acquainted is improbable; but they seem to share a tireless dog, who runs incessantly along the leagues of planking which separate them. The bridge did at last open, and everything on the river, unmindful of everything else, rushed headlong at the opening, like a crowd of sinners dashing for a suddenly unbarred door into heaven. Our tug jerked us into the throng, a fearful squeeze, and we were through. We cast off, the gulden were collected in a tin, and within five minutes we were moored in the New Haven, under the lee of the Groote Kerk, with trees all around us, in whose high tops a full gale was now blowing. The next morning our decks were thickly carpeted with green leaves, a singular sight. The harbor-master came aboard to demand dues, and demanded them in excellent English. âWhere did you learn English?â I asked, and he answered with strange pride: âSir, I served seven years under the British flag.â Standing heedless in the cockpit, under driving rain, he recounted the casualties of the night. Fifteen miles higher up the river a fifteen-hundred-ton barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consisting, _inter alia_, of all his family, were drowned. I inquired how such an event could happen in a narrow river amid a numerous population, and learned that in rough weather these barges anchor when a tug can do no more with them, and the crew go to bed and sleep. The water gradually washes in and washes in, until the barge is suddenly and silently engulfed. Dutch phlegm! Corresponding to their Sabbatic phlegm, no doubt. Said the harbor-master: âYes, there is a load-line, but they never takes no notice of it in Holland; they just loads them up till they wonât hold any more.â The fatalism of the working-classes everywhere is perhaps the most utterly astounding of all human phenomena. Thoughtful, I went off to examine the carved choir-stalls in the Groote Kerk. These choir-stalls are among the most lovely sights in Holland. Their free, fantastic beauty is ravishing and unforgetable; they make you laugh with pleasure as you behold them. I doubt not that they were executed by a rough-tongued man, in a dirty apron, with shocking finger-nails. [Illustration: 0052] CHAPTER III--DUTCH WORK We passed through Rotterdam more than once, without seeing more of it than the amazing traffic of its river and its admirable zoological gardens full of chromatically inclined parrots; but we stopped at a minor town close by, on a canal off the Meuse, Schiedam. Instinct must have guided me, for the sociological interest of Schiedam was not inconsiderable. Schiedam is called by the Dutch âstinking Schiedam.â I made a circuit of the town canals in the dinghy and convinced myself that the epithet was just and not malicious. On the lengthy quays were a large number of very dignified gin distilleries, whose architecture was respectable and sometimes even very good, dating from perhaps early in the last century. Each had a baptismal name, such as âLiverpool,â inscribed in large letters across its faÃ§ade. This rendering decent and this glorification of gin constituted an impressive phenomenon. But it was the provinciality and the uncouth melancholy of the apparently prosperous town that took my fancy. We walked through all its principal streets in the rain, and I thought I had never seen a provinciality so exquisitely painful and perfect. In this city of near thirty thousand people there was not visible one agreeably imposing shop, or one woman attired with intent to charm, or one yard of smooth pavement. I know not why I find an acrid pleasure in thus beholding mediocrity, the average, the everyday ordinary, as it is; but I do. No museum of Amsterdam, The Hague, or Haarlem touched me so nearly as the town of Schiedam, which, after all, I suppose I must have liked. Toward six oâclock we noticed an unquiet, yet stodgy, gathering in the square where is the electric-tram terminus, then a few uniforms. I asked a superior police officer what there was. He said in careful, tranquil English: âThere is nothing. But there is a strike of glass-workers in the town. Some of them donât want to work, and some of them do want to work. Those that have worked to-day are being taken home in automobiles. That is all.â I was glad it was all, for from his manner I had expected him to continue to the effect that the glass-workers had been led away by paid agitators and had no good reason to strike. The automobiles began to come along, at intervals, at a tremendous pace, each with a policeman by the chauffeurâs side. In one was a single artisan, middle-aged, with a cigar in the corner of his mouth, and a certain adventurous look in his eye. The crowd grimly regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were there by accident, but obviously they lacked histrionic training. In short, the scene was one of the common objects of the wayside of existence all over the civilized world. It presented no novelty whatever, and yet to witness it in Holland was piquant, and caused one to think afresh and perhaps more clearly. At night, when it had ceased to rain. I was escorting a friend to the station. Musicians were climbing up into the bandstand in the same square. It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly municipal concert. The railway-station, far out, was superbly gloomy, and it was the only station in Holland where I failed to get a non-Dutch newspaper. The train, with the arrogance of an international express, slid in, slid out, and forgot Schiedam. I emerged from the station alone. A one-horse tram was waiting. The tram, empty, with a sinking, but everlasting, white horse under a yellow cloth, was without doubt the most provincial and melancholy thing that destiny has yet brought me in contact with. The simple spectacle of it, in the flickering gaslights and in the light of its own lamps, filled the heart, with an anguish inexplicable and beautiful. I got in. An age passed. Then an old workman got in, and saluted; I saluted. Save for the saluting, it was the Five Towns of the eighties over again, intensified, and the last tram out of Hanbridge before the theater-tram. An age passed. Then a mysterious figure drew the cloth off the horse, and the horse braced up all its four legs. We were starting when a tight-folded umbrella waved in the outer obscurity. An elderly, easy-circumstanced couple arrived upon us with deliberation; the umbrella was a good one. We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long curves of suburban desolation. Then a few miserable shops that ought to have been shut; then the square once more, now jammed in every part with a roaring, barbaric horde. In the distance, over a floor of heads, was an island of illumination, with the figures of puffing and blowing musicians in it; but no rumor of music could reach us through the din. The white horse trotted mildly into and right through the multitude, which jeered angrily, but fell back. An enormous multitude, Gothic, Visi-gothic, savage, uncivilized, chiefly consisting of young men and big boys--the weekly concert of humanizing music! [Illustration: 0057] I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty canal-side to the yacht. The impression of stagnation, tedium, provincialism was overwhelming. Nevertheless, here, as in other towns, we were struck by the number of shop-windows with artistâs materials for sale. Such was Schiedam. If it is asked whether I went to Holland on a yachting cruise to see this sort of thing, the answer is that I just did. After a few weeks I began to perceive that Schiedam and similar places, though thrilling, were not the whole of Holland, and perhaps not the most representative of Holland. As the yacht worked northward, Holland seemed to grow more Dutch, until, in the chain of shallow lakes and channels that hold Friesland in a sort of permanent baptism, we came to what was for me the ideal or celestial Holland--everything done by water, even grass cut under water, and black-and-white cows milked in the midst of ponds, and windmills over the eternal flatness used exclusively to shift inconvenient water from one level to another. The road is water in Friesland, and all the world is on the road. If your approach to a town is made perilous by a succession of barges that will obstinately keep the middle of the channel, you know that it is market-day in that town, and the farmers are rolling home in agreeable inebriation. The motor broke down in Friesland, and we were immobolized in the midst of blue-green fields, red dogs, the cows aforesaid, green milk-floats, blue-bloused sportsmen, and cargoes of cannon-ball cheese. We decided to tow the yacht until we got to a favorable reach. Certain barges sailed past us right into the eye of the wind, against all physical laws, but the _Velsa_ possessed not this magic. We saw three men comfortably towing a string of three huge barges, and we would tow. Unfortunately the only person, the skipper, who knew how to tow had to remain on board. The cook, the deck-hand, and I towed like Greeks pulling against Greeks, and could scarcely move one little yacht. The cook, neurasthenic by temperament, grew sad, until he fell into three feet of inundation, which adventure struck him as profoundly humorous, so that he was contorted with laughter. This did not advance the yacht. Slowly we learned that towing is not mere brute striving, but an art. We at last came to terms with a tug, as our desire was to sleep at Sneek. Sneek is the veritable metropolis of those regions. After passing, at late dusk, the mysterious night-watchers of eel-nets, who are wakened in their elaborate green-and-yellow boats by a bell, like a Paris concierge, we gradually emerged into nocturnal Sneek through a quadruple lane of barges and tugs so long as to put Sneek among the seven great ports of the world. And even in Sneek at nightfall the impression of immense quantities of water and of greenness, yellowness, and redness was continued. It rained, as usual, in Sneek the next day, but no rain and no water could damp Sneek. It was the most active town any of us had ever seen. It must have been the original âhive of industry.â 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 cafÃ©s were full of dealers and drovers, mostly rather jolly, being served by slatternly, pleasant women. The streets were full of good shops, and of boys and girls following us and touching us to see if we existed. (Dreadful little boors!) The barges were full of cauliflowers, cabbages, apples, potatoes, sabots, cheeses, and barrels. The canals were full of barges and steamers. And immediately one sat down to sketch a group of craft one learned that nothing was stationary. Everything moved that floated--everything on the surface of miles of canal! Everybody, without haste, but without stopping ever, was tirelessly engaged in shifting matter from one spot to another. At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty tons, would set off for a neighboring village with a few passengers,--including nice girls,--a few cattle, and high piles of miscellaneous packages; or would come in from a neighboring village. The kaleidoscope was everlasting; but it did not fatigue, because it never hurried. Only it made us ashamed of our idleness. Gently occupied old country-women, with head-dresses of lace-work and a gold casque, the whole ridiculously surmounted by a black bonnet for fashionâs sake--even these old women made us ashamed of our untransporting idleness. [Illustration: 0063] Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand inhabitants! As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden, a new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who had been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich, spoke thus: âIs this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and live at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes, and they âre so calm.â I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said: âWell, they âre all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as much in another way. Sneek is the mean.â CHAPTER IV--THE ZUYDER ZEE WE reached the Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a respectably picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken, the alleged jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs and the costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New York for the instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the mainland, a long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said that Marken was a side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native country. So I decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner of the only foreign yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without visiting Marken. My real reason was undoubtedly that the dayâs program had been upset by undue lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam. Thus we sailed due north for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken there might be something lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed. The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you donât mind rain, and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet. It has the appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom with our sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged field. The skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under ice, and how he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren, risking his life for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the next day, with more fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because there was no other way home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled and immense pond, with a bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of diminished trees and houses sticking up out of its horizons here and there. When these low silhouettes happen to denote your destination, they have the strange faculty of receding from your prow just as fast as you sail toward them, a magic sea of an exquisite monotony; and when you arrive anywhere, you are so surprised at having overtaken the silhouette that your arrival is a dream, in the unreal image of a city. The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead. We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never saw one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye--beautiful domestic architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals. If it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be inhabited exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did eight sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break at billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses per head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue blouses throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story of a brown and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man was in the second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They were flinging cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we left, and they never dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung into the mysterious night, when the great forms of little cargo-steamers floated soundless over romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long, white English steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its flulfy chambermaid, and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its myriad lights and gleams, glided to a berth by the water-tower, and hung there like a cloud beyond the town, keeping me awake half the night while I proved to myself that I did not really envy its owner and that the Velsa was really a much better yacht. [Illustraion: 0070] The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the Dutch army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand the phrase âEast Indian cigar.â He said there were no such cigars in his parentsâ shop. When I said âSumatra,â he understood, and fetched his mother. When I said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn, his mother put away all the samples already exhibited and fetched his father. The family had begun to comprehend that a serious customer had strayed into the shop. The father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity and deference went up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of cigars that were warm to the touch. âThese are the best?â âThese are the best.â I bought. They were threepence apiece. A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like too many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs--dogs that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order to prove that they are of the race that has always ended by expelling invaders with bloodshed. I was safer in the yachtâs dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched, three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into the canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone on the quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as table-tops--cleaner. The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first glance, exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I remember it as the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner steering, and foul the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his owner, as if to say, âYou see what owners do when they take charge.â I admitted it. We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy and recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having taken to his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail in a jiffy. The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become an omnibus conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus conductor will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young man, and himself painted in water-colors. [Illustration: 0076] I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town; but I know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely practical town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the cook. We were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised even by E. V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation. Kampen has architecture,--wonderful gates,--but it also has the crudest pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east wind was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner of Kampen was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen, which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning was warm and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven weeks continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three hours we were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was steering. âPlease keep the center of the channel,â the skipper enjoined me. I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go to Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the town. Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end surcease, and all their long-colored _weins_ (vanes) streamed in the wind against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was the spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses that pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue ensign), and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay and held him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the spectacle of his aged fatherâs trading barge, unexpectedly making for the same port, with his mother, brother, and sister on deck--the crew! Arrived in port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the skipper boarded his old home with becoming placidity. The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom nated by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a smack arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed to be always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass. The town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a square. Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in Indian reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely imitated from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the church was a picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a sacristan out
{'title': 'From the Log of the Velsa by Arnold Bennett', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}