SCHEVENINGEN5 P.M. TO 6 P.M.
5 P.M. TO 6 P.M.
Nurturedin the salt sadness of the sea, Scheveningen is a Whistler nocturne. Its prevailing and distinctive tones are neutral and elusive. There are, of course, days when the sun is as clear and powerful here as elsewhere, but more often it is obscured; then the sky becomes pearly, the sea opalescent, the shore drab and dun. Presently a thin fog drifts in, or vapors steal over the trees from the inland marshes, and all tints are rapidly neutralized into a common dimness of that vague and sentimental mistland so dear to the heart of the painter. This is the characteristic suspended color note of the average day at Scheveningen. It harmonizes to perfection with the sentiment of the environment and invests the region with a marvelous charm—peculiar, distinctive, and of the finest dignity.
The power of Scheveningen’s attraction, the force of its appeal, lies largely in its grim aloofness and self-sufficiency. It is unsympathetic, discouraging. It consistently dominates its visitors, and, indeed, with an easy insolence and indifference. Wealth and fashion may abide with it for a few days, under tolerance, butthe impression of the temporary and migratory character of their sojourn is always present. Undistracted, the fierce and gaunt sea assails the stark and surly shore, and the grim fishermen stand by and have their toll of both. Of the presence of the strangers they are all but unaware. In a brief day the incongruous invaders will have gone, but this relentless warfare will continue unabated. All the way from Helder to the Hook glistening seas will hiss over the flat beaches, snarling and biting at the shoulders of the dunes. All through the long, bitter winter, without an instant’s intermission, the struggle will go on. It is, consequently, of the very heart of the charm of the place that one has the feeling of intruding on battle; of tolerated propinquity to Titanic contenders.
Loafing at Scheveningen is the apotheosis of idleness. The strong wind stimulates, the broad beaches delight, the solemn sea inspires. To this must be added the sense of strong contrasts. It emphasizes the impression of having dropped, for a time, out of the familiar monotony of Life’s treadmill; of being away from home; of both resting and recreating. It is present to the eyes in the eloquent disproportion between the vast Kurhaus and the diminutive homes of the villagers; in the incongruity of Parisian finery invading the savage haunts of the gull and the curlew. In the novel and bizarre activities of the fisher-folk, as in their theatrical surroundings as well, one finds just the right touch of thepicturesque and the unfamiliar to complete the full realization ofdolce far niente.
Of the fabled monsters of the wild North Sea the imaginative man will believe he sees one certain survivor in that languid sea-serpent of a pier—the “Jetée Königin Wilhelmina”—that stretches its delicate length a quarter mile over the waves from off the drab sand dunes of Scheveningen. Its pavilion-crowned head snuggles flatly on the water. In the afternoon and evening, when its orchestra is playing, one fancies the monster is actually singing. At five o’clock, precisely, we have its last drowsy utterance as it drops off into a three-hours’ nap—quite as Fafner, in the opera, yawns at Alberich and mutters “lasst mich schlafen!” It must be admitted it is a highly pleasing song he sings,—a Waldteufel waltz, more than likely,—and we come in time to recognize in it the closing number of thematinée musicale. And then, like Jonah’s captor, he wearies of his living contents; and we see them emerge by hundreds, scathless and unafraid, gay with parasols and immaculate of raiment, and pick their way leisurely along his back until they have rejoined their friends in the voluble company that crowds the cafés of the Kurhaus. In a moment more the abandoned monster is fast asleep; which, by a familiar association of ideas, is a sign to the multitudes on the beaches that surf-bathing ends in just one hour.
Forthwith, there is a great bustling all along theshore side of the broad boulevard they call the “Standweg.” Bathers pick themselves up regretfully from sunbaths in the soft, powdery sand and trot down for a final dip in the surf, and those already in hasten to convert pleasure into work with increased energy and enthusiasm. To all such the implacable watchman shall come within the hour and beckon them out with stern and remorseless gestures, and the curious little wagons they call bath-cars will engulf each in turn and trundle them up out of the water, while the nervous old women who look after the bathing-suits will hover about with anxious eyes and lay violent hands on the dripping and discarded garments.
SCHEVENINGEN BEACH
SCHEVENINGEN BEACH
And now a tremendous clamor arises from all the little Holland children, who, from early morning, have been indulging the national instinct for dike-building and surrounding their mothers’ beach-chairs with scientific sand-bulwarks against the imaginary encroachments of the sea. For lo! their nurses approach, wonderful in white streamers and golden head-ornaments, and visions of the odious ante-prandial toilet rise like North Sea fogs in every youngster’s eye until even dinner itself appears abhorrent. Vagabond jugglers run through their final tricks, fold their carpets and steal away. Itinerant peddlers redouble their efforts and retire disgusted or jubilant as Fortune may have hidden or shown her face. More than ever does the sea front take on the appearance of a long apiary, withthe hundreds of tall, shrouded beehives of beach-chairs emptying themselves of their comfortable occupants and being bundled by bee-men in white linen to safety for the night. And of all the odd sights of Scheveningen certainly no other will remain longer in mind than this curious, huddled colony of beach-chairs. What a pleasing and cheerful spectacle! Thronging the shore for quite a mile they contribute to the local picture decidedly its most jolly and fantastic feature. Between the beach-chairs and the boulevard there is a picket line of prim little peaked white tents, with the top of each precisely matching all the others in an edging of stiff, woodeny scallops; now that the flaps are thrown back and the sides rolled up, we see tables and chairs inside, with evidence of recent and jovial occupancy.
To the eye of a man taking his comfort at the pretty little Café de la Plage on the Kurhaus terrace, all this bustle and late afternoon animation is bound to prove decidedly diverting. The broad, paved plazas that lie like carpets between him and the dunes are steadily filling with a considerable proportion of the thirty thousand Hollanders and Germans who summer here, and acquaintances are exchanging civilities and joining and taking leave of little groups in a way to make the general picture a brilliant, restless, and bewildering interweaving of color. As the open-air tables are filling, the activity of the waiters approaches hysteria, and the verandas and saloons of the ponderous Kurhausbegin to hum with the advent of the evening guests. Copies of “Le Courrier de Schéveningue” pass from hand to hand as the curious scan the lists of the latest arrivals or look over the various musical programmes of the evening. Out on the terraces, the ornate little newspaper kiosks attract groups of loiterers and gradually take on the character of social centres, and as these companies increase, one thinks of stock exchanges and the rallying about the trading standards. The matinée at the Seinpost concludes and out troops its audience to swell the human high tide. Bright bits of color are afforded by the blue uniforms and yellow facings of Holland infantrymen dotted here and there in the press. It is odd to see the usually arid and monotonous dunes grow brilliant with an artificial blossoming of fashionable millinery, where by nature there is nothing better than a scraggy growth of stringy heather, a little rosemary and broom, or the dry stem of the “miller.”
It is at this hour, when “the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,” that the stolid natives array themselves and sally forth, like Delft tiles come to life, to the amused amazement of the visitors. Your Scheveningen man is wont to go about his duties, during the day, flopping vigorously in vivid red knickerbockers, voluminous as sails and quite as crudely patched; but when he makes a point of toilet he appears in gray homespun, the knickerbockers cut from the same pattern as the red ones, but there is a jacket closed up to the chin withtwo rows of large buttons, a red handkerchief twisted about the neck, a small cap with a glazed peak, and, of course, the woodenklompen. Such a display richly deserves attention, but what can the poor man expect when his wife appears in her full regalia! She, too, is shod withklompen,—though you have to take that on faith in view of the dozen or two of petticoats that balloon above them,—and her waist is a gay butterfly of variegated embroidery, while her headgear is about the most incredible thing conceivable. You might, at a distance, mistake them for bishops with their mitres tilted back at a rakish angle. Nor is it always of the one pattern. Usually it is a sort of long white cap of linen, embroidered at the edges; and the wearer adds a touch of coquetry in the shape of a long curl hanging at either side. But not infrequently you see a formidable contrivance of vastly more consequence; it consists, first, of a skullcap of polished gold or silver, technically known as ahoofdijzer, pierced at the top for ventilation and cut to leave room for the exposure of the forehead, and over this is drawn an elaborate cape of lace, with gold ornaments of spirals and squares dangling over the ears. This triumph of millinery never fails to elicit cries of delight from feminine visitors, or to set mere man to chuckling. It is most likely to form a part of the impressive gear of the nurses from the provinces, who have more money for such uses than the wives of the fishermen; and the things that are told to newcomersas to the significance of this or that ornament is the boldest advantage ever taken of innocent credulity. They undertook to tell me that you could distinguish between married, single, and engaged women by glancing at the ornaments—I wonder if you can! It is said that parents present their daughters with this headdress on the day of their confirmation; and that it is a fine sight to behold the array of them at kermesstime with their wearers, six or eight abreast, arm in arm, rushing down the streets in the odd dances peculiar to those festivals, droning monotonous tunes.
To my way of thinking the unflagging industry of the Scheveningen women is a matter of quite as much note. One seldom sees them without their knitting, even when they are recreating, and as they stroll along, laughing and chatting together, their fingers, all unnoticed by them, are flashing with extraordinary speed like things of an independent volition. Many of the women wear no sleeves and take great pride in their strong, round arms; and this, I am told, is the case even in winter when they are cracked and purple from exposure to the cold.
The faces of the elder fisher-folk are studies in wrinkles. Their eyes are brave and quizzical, but with a certain settled hardness, not perhaps to be unlooked-for in men and women who come of a stock that for five hundred years has forced even the savage North Sea to yield them a livelihood. They show next to nothing of humor,but rather a stern and weary hopelessness. Strong faces are these, hard, weather-beaten faces, but eloquent of tenacity and desperate courage. They have been called “the most poetic and original of all Hollanders.” They are grave, dignified, and self-reliant; and as they pass you by they show their invariable courtesy in a bow and a quiet “Goe ’n Dag.” One has only to see them to feel the propriety and justification of the boast in their national song:—
“Wilhelmus van Nassouwe,Ben ick van Duijtschen Bloedt!”
“Wilhelmus van Nassouwe,Ben ick van Duijtschen Bloedt!”
“Wilhelmus van Nassouwe,Ben ick van Duijtschen Bloedt!”
“Wilhelmus van Nassouwe,
Ben ick van Duijtschen Bloedt!”
Fishermen naturally suggest ships, and if you glance down the beach you will usually see several of them drawn up to the edge of the water, with the red, white, and blue of Holland at the masthead. During the mid-summer season the fishing-fleet is away on the cruise for red herring off the coasts of Scotland, but there are always a few that could not get away, and so we have the famous Scheveningenbomon its native strand. How the artists have delighted in these lumbering, flat-bottomed tubs, ponderous of mast and weathered of sail! Mesdag, Maris, Alfred Stevens, and the rest have familiarized the world with this fantastic and picturesque craft. Who would buy a painting of Scheveningen unless it showed abomor two hauled up on the beach? And that is precisely theraison d’ êtreof thebom—it can be hauled up on the beach. Otherwise,what should a Scheveningen fisherman do with a boat, having no deep-water harbor at hand nor anchorage facility? There have, through the centuries, been many other styles of Dutch fishing-boats,—busses, loggers, hookers, sloops, pinken, etc.,—and at times, when the forehanded Hollanders have made away with the lion’s share of the foreign catch, outsiders have lost patience and classed them all as “Dutch toads”; but there have been nobomsbut Scheveningenboms. Nowadays they have had to build them larger and they do not beach so easily, and it is probably only a matter of time when steam vessels will supplant them altogether; but when that evil hour strikes the chiefest picturesque glory of this little village will have forever departed.
There used to be vast excitement, in the old days, over the first herring catch of the season, and it was always hurried ashore and conveyed to the king’s table with no end of flourish and punctilio. Over at Vlaardingen they used to post a watchman on the church tower, and when he made out the first boat coming in he would hoist a blue flag and all the people trooped joyfully down to the wharves shouting a song called “De Nieuwe Haring.” Scheveningen, indeed, still presents one of its most picturesque scenes when the returning fishermen arrive and their catch is auctioned off, down the beach near the lighthouse, with much more of gusto and excitement than you would imagine these phlegmatic people could muster. The shrewd Scheveningenfishermen have learned how to eke out the bare three hundred florins they realize from a year’s fishing by turning new tricks in the way of rope-spinning, sail-making, ship-building, and curing and smoking the herring. The fish go into this latter process as “steur haring” and emerge as “bokking”—if that means anything to anybody!
The long-beaked curlew that flashes overhead with hoarse, raucous news of the sea looks down at this hour on pleasant and curious sights as he wings his swift circle above the Scheveningen neighborhood. The placid village of twisted alleys, of innumerable “Tabak te Koop” signs, of queer little gabled houses and unpainted fishermen’s huts, has emptied its good folk into its narrow main street which, fickle of name, starts out as Keizer-Straat, almost immediately becomes Willem-Straat, and within a moment is the Oud-Weg. Here one sees in actual life the fascinating things he has marveled over in the canvases of Teniers, Jan Steen, and Gerard Dou,—good Dutchvrowssupper-marketing. There they go, ballooning along, bargaining and bustling from shop to shop, storing capacious hampers with game and cheeses, and every grim line in their faces shouts a challenge to the shopmen to best them by so much as astuiverif they can. From time to time, quaint little children like sturdy Dutch toys escape from the press and clatter off home, with an air of vast responsibility, hugging in both arms a brown loaf of bread a yard long.How it recalls the bright pages of “Hans Brinker”; and as you catch a glimpse of the broad canal down the street it is natural enough to speculate upon the probability of Gretel’s winning another pair of silver skates before you get back to Scheveningen next summer.
In the meadows back of the village women in blue shawls are drying and mending fishing-nets, nor do they so much as raise their heads as the yellow, double-decked tramway car rumbles past on its trip to The Hague. If all seats are occupied the car will display a large sign marked “Vol,” and rattle along oblivious to appeals from any and all who ask to get on. It is but three scant miles to the beautiful capital of Holland and the tramway makes it in ten minutes—a notable concession by leisurely Holland to the time-saving spirit of the age, in view of other days when they devoted a half-hour to making the same journey by canal barge. The broad, smooth highway that the yellow car follows is, as every one knows, one of the favorite roads of Europe. As the curlew looks down, between five and six o’clock of any bright summer afternoon, he is sure to find it thronged with handsome equipages and to see gay companies in each little wayside inn that peeps out from the deep shade of the noble trees. The desired touch of the foreign and unusual is supplied to the visitor in the scores of heavy carts drawn by frisking, barking dogs; in the ever-present windmills beating the air with long, awkward arms; and in dozens of storks that cock their wiseheads over the edges of their nests and regard the passing show with philosophic amusement, patient as the old apple-women of Amsterdam.
The ScheveningenBoschis one of the most delightful woods imaginable. It is national property, and no private park could be more beautifully kept up. A ball would roll with perfect smoothness down its driveways of crushed gravel, and even Ireland would be taxed to equal the vivid greenness of its lawns. This whole fair forest is studded with villas of the aristocracy and even of royalty. Their wide verandas and orchards and flowery lawns move the most contented to envy a Hollander the comfort he takes in hiszomerhuis. To know theBoschrightly it must be walked through; and the more leisurely and the oftener, the better. It is not only a lovely woodland set with charming homes, but everything a fine forest should be. The green and coppery beeches, the hardy oaks and elms, and the living embroidery of bright flowers perfume the air with delicate odors; and the wind in the lofty tops makes sweet and haunting music. Deep down in the clear mirror of the canals, splotches of broad leaf shadows lazily float and dapple like drowsy fishes. Through the deep foliage you catch occasional glimpses of open, sunny meadows, with cows contentedly grazing; and you come to revel in every vague and tranquil sensation.
In the midst of this beautiful forest, two centuries and a half ago, the best-beloved and most widely read ofHolland’s poets—the venerable Jacob Cats—composed his madrigals and moral fables, and so passed the last eight years of his eventful career. Rembrandt loved and painted him, and a monument stands to his memory in his native town of Brouwershaven. They say his books are in every peasants’ hut and his verses in every peasant’s heart. His cottage was at Zorgvliet, a few steps from Scheveningen, near where the Queen Mother now has her summer home, and there in the garden of the Café de la Promenade they will show you the old stone table at which he wrote, with the hole he cut in it for his inkstand.
Wild game throng the wooded inner dunes. Partridges, hares, and rabbits abound in the underbrush, and the polder meadows yield the finest grade of mallard ducks. The pines and firs are resonant with the calls of cuckoos, pheasants, and nightingales. Farmers clear patches of ground to serve as finch flats, which they callvinkie baans; and there, in the autumn, they snare chaffinches which they sell for a cent apiece, to be used as a garnishment in serving other game.
As you look out across the Scheveningen dunes and watch the day declining, stirring thoughts come trooping to mind of the gallant scenes these bleak shores have witnessed. Off yonder, two centuries and a half ago, fell the brave Tromp, hero of thirty-three sea fights. On the bridge of his lofty-sterned Brederode he died, as every true warrior longs to die, in the foremost thick ofthe fray. “I am done; but keep up a good heart,” were his last words as they carried him into his cabin. Next day they brought his body to these shores and bore it away to lie in the old gray church at Delft beside the revered William the Silent. “The bravest are the tenderest,” and his war-hardened sailors were not ashamed to weep as heartily for him as the little children, fifty years before, had wept in the streets for the great William. Half a dozen years later a shouting multitude thronged this beach and waved abon voyageto CharlesIIof England as he sailed homeward to his recovered throne, to restore a licentious court and renew such royal revels as had already cost England a revolution. Another dozen years roll around, and Scheveningen looks on while the fleets of France and England are battered to wreckage by the cannon of Holland’s pet hero, the intrepid De Ruyter. A century or so more, and once again this village is the storm centre of Holland’s hopes and fears as William FrederickIeludes the pursuing French troops and a little Scheveningen fishing-smack bears the whole royal family away in safety to Germany. And when he came back in triumph, twenty years later, it was at Scheveningen that he landed, and at the very spot where yonder gray obelisk now stands in commemoration.
And now through chilly mists the sun, a vast bloated orange, settles down into the glowing wastes of the desolate North Sea. The roaring surf spreads glitteringcarpets far up the beach. It has suddenly become a region of placid power and glory, something quite other than the fabled home of monsters and terrors, of tempest and shipwreck. That vessel in the offing, with the black hull and the crimson sails, may be the very Flying Dutchman’s own; but still you would like to be on it and so much nearer the sinking sun. The sky is astounding; like a glorified Holland! There you see cloud-islands more wonderful than Walcheren; gray wastes that beggar the Zuyder Zee; sky dunes that stretch beyond Helder or the Hook; meadows more gorgeous than the tulip fields of Haarlem; celestial flora more pure and palpitating than any fairest, faintest bloom in any rarest, dimmest glade throughout the whole woodland of The Hague. It is Hollandin excelsis.