0191
We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck guided us into the Café de l’Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers of this industrious café had that peculiar air, both independent and amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that is firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous manners about the Café de l’Industrie, 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, occupied, hasty, both curt and expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: “Look here, I know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, 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 pursuit 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 d’ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music, and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave the Hotel ————, with its extreme correctitude.
Finally, among our excursions ‘n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy hour in the restaurant of the Hotel ————, supreme example of what the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish when it sets about to imitate the Germanart nouveau. The ———— is a grand hotel in which everything, with the most marvelous and terrifying ingenuity, 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 history. 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 ordered a new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order had been fulfilled. It was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly have been costly. It was impressive proof of real initiative. It intimidated the beholder, who had the illusion of being on another planet. Its ultimate effect was to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I doubt whether in Berlin itself such ingenious and complete 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 pinnacle.
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 overwhelming. 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 originality.
The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl’s Court ought to be, and is not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst of the city, restaurants, cafés, 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 tightrope. The opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We happened to arrive at Copenhagen just in time for the fêtes 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 ignored. It probably uses more electric light than any other ten institutions put together. And however keenly you may resent its commonplace attraction, that attraction will one day magnetize you to enter its gates—at the usual fee.
I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people 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 cf the women, which was remarkable, 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 thousand represented in chief the unassuming middle-class of Copenhagen.
0197
There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, “nuts,” rascals, obelisks, 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 Northern 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’ouvre under rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to 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.
THE harbor-master would not allow us to remain for more than three days in our original 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 bureaucracy of whose language you are ignorant.
The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station, and also opposite a shipbuilding yard, and from the west came a strong odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. 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 Royal Danish Yacht Club might have chosen more comfortable quarters for itself. We therefore unostentatiously weighed anchor again, and reëntered the town, and hid ourselves among many businesslike tugs in a little creek called the New Haven, whose extremity was conveniently close to the Café d’Angleterre. We hoped that the prowling harbor-master would not catch sight of us, and he did not.
0204
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 octagonalplace) thrown into one. Here all the prospects and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly exclusive. The eighteenth century had nobly survived, 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 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 Frederiks Church, whose copper dome overtops the other copper domes, is a fair example of the quarter. 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 scrupulously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the marble 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 life 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 furnishing which lifts them far above the heavy, stuffy, tasteless mediocrity of such homes as the Rosenborg. Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed with the miscellaneous ugliness of generations of royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight to people of taste; and the few very lovely tilings 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 occasionally, 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 sympathy. It is the most bourgeois home I ever entered. 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 maimers 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 Rembrandt—“Christ at Emmaus”—and one good modern picture, a plowing scene by Wilhelmson. We carefully searched the immense rooms for another good modern picture, and found it not. Even the 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 deluge, 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 inadvertence. 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 admiration of Danish art; imagine ingenuous, mackintoshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and terrific marble Venuses and other gods; imagine the whispering in front of anecdotes in paint; imagine the Inferno of an artist—and you have the art museum, the abode and lurking-place of everlasting 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, 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 lifelike 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 n gazing at them!
0209
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 Danish women were apposite enough to wander about the sculpture rooms for our delectation, making delicious contrasts against the background of marble groups.
WE left Copenhagen with regrets, for the entity 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’ quarter, 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 café, with mysterious music heating behind glazed doors, or an emporium of some sort for sailors. Revelries began 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 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-combustion engine 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 inexplicable. 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 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 engine-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 occurred in the bowels of theVelsa. We made sail, and crawled back to the sound, and mournfully anchored 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 irremediable.
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 earlier so sweet a name in our ears, was now hateful to us, a kind of purgatory to which we were condemned for the sins of others.
0216
The making and fitting of the new bearing occupied just seventy hours. During this interminable 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 hooks, 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 Germany. We gradually understood that at Copenhagen railways are a trifle, and the sea a matter of the highest importance. Nearly all traffic is seaborne.
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.
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 unwieldy 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 futility of saluting guns! The two English 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 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 theVelsawould 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 nightmares of the impossibility of ever quitting Copenhagen, 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, and yawn, and stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the yacht’s deck.
0221
The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; 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; everything 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 miraculously recreated; and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.
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. Nevertheless, 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, however, we started, adventurous, for the far coasts of Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel was a gray and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale. And I also was weary and uneasy, for it is impossible 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 experience, 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 nothing 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. Vitality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed exceedingly 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.
And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray, and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a white cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and potent draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances of beauty! Only the finest China tea is employed aboard theVelsa. I drank, and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was transformed. We began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling over, spurted. It was a grand life. 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, theJean 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.
0228
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 acolytes. The skipper usually receives the representatives 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 republic in my saloon; we were ravishingly polite 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 like the French. A French milliner will make a hat out of a piece of felt and nothing; and a French official will make a diplomatic episode out of nothing at all, putting into five minutes of futility all the Gallic civilization of centuries.
Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes on is extraordinary. 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 between 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 ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the tail-end of one south gale, and now another was predicted! How could small people like 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 horizon. Soon we were in the midst of a squall ourselves. 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 surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex roofs of Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top, and the illimitable 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, Suppé’s “Boccaccio” was to be performed that night, and Massenet’s “Thaïs” 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, pitching like a toy. The rain soon veiled her, and she was gone. I could not picture theVelsain such a situation, at any rate with the owner on board. We went back, rather pensive, to the Quai Chanzy.
0234
The men in the pilot-boat alongside theVelsawere not in the least reassuring as to the chances of theVelsaever 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 antipathetic to the digestive organs, and may jaundice the true bright color of the world for days.
The transaction of the eels, strengthened our intimacy 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 steamers arrive and depart. On one day they are the pilot’s crew, and on the next they are porters to carry your handbags through the customs. This was a blow to me, because on the innumerable occasions 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 compassion and tips. I now divined that their activities were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed together like a Chinese puzzle, and all reasonably remunerative. The which was very French and admirable. 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 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 water-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly that he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought proofs of his genius cut of the forecastle, even then we were not truly interested. We thirsted to depart, and could not. Our sole solace was to walk round and round the basini 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 finished 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 ornamentation of the deck-houses and companions of these vessels showed a great deal of fantasy and brilliant color, though little taste. And the general effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demonstrating, 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 important 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 dotted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible to go south, since we could not have made headway. 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 decided 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 expectancy filled the ship, and I went into the town to buy some of the beautiful meat-pies that are offered in its shops.
0239
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 water, 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 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 sailors, 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 perpetrate 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 assuredly 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 possibly nobody was more astonished than themselves at their success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an expert, a member of an exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course shoreward in circumstances not devoid of danger.
“What are you about?” was the affrighted question. 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 theVelsa, 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 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.
0246
The sea took on the most delicate 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 6:10 p. m., and the skipper was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering 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 little 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 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 theVelsa’ssister (occasion for the historic remark that “the world is very small”), a yacht well known to the skipper, of exactly the same lines as theVelsa, 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 awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon skylights open.
The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness 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-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is as factitious as a meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is Belgian, more than Belgian—Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident, simple, unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are full of little cafés that are full of little men and fat women. All the little streets are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum quantity of sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs drawing little carts hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars and the whistling of railway engines.
On this Sunday morning there was a band festival 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 marketing to do, as the cook declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish, and we waited impatiently under umbrellas for the procession 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 instruments and all the dark uniforms of the puffy instrumentalists 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-baptized beef and vegetal des and tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the interesting 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 interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the country. “There’s a pretty walk over there,” he said; “but there’s nothing here,” pointing 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 Sunday, 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 ‘ll manage with mineral water, and then we ‘ll move on to Bruges.” In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than to be standing still.
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 skipper. He said that he was not supposed to swing forcanal-boats.
“Canal-boat!” the skipper cried. “By what canal do you think I brought this ship across the North Sea?” He was coldly sarcastic, and his sarcasm 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-population of Belgium and Holland, but especially Belgium, 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 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.