The Other Fellow Part 8

We were now reaching the open country. The houses were few and farther apart. The street lamps gave out; so did the telegraph wires festooned with snow loops. Soon a big building, square, gray, sombre-looking, like a jail, loomed up on a hill. Then we entered a gate between flickering lamps, and tugged up a steep road, and stopped. Cabby sprang down and rang a bell, which sounded in the white stillness like a fire-gong. A door opened, and a flood of light streamed out, showing the kindly face and figure of an old priest in silhouette, the yellow glow forming a golden background.

"Come, sonny," said cabby, throwing open the cab door.

The little fellow slid down again from the seat, caught up the box and bundle, and, looking me full in the face, said:--

"It _was_ too far to walk."

There were no thanks, no outburst. He was merely a chip in the current. If he had just escaped some sunken rock, it was the way with chips like himself. All boys went to asylums, and had no visible fathers nor invisible mothers nor friends. This talk about boys going swimming, and catching bull-frogs, and robbing birds' nests, and playing ball, and "hooky," and marbles, was all moonshine. Boys never did such things, except in story-books. He was a boy himself, and knew. There couldn't anything better happen to a boy than being sent to an orphan asylum. Everybody knew that. There was nothing strange about it. That's what boys were made for.

All this was in his eyes.

When I reached the platform and faced my audience, I was dinnerless, half an hour late, and still in my traveling dress.

I began as follows:--

"Ladies and gentlemen, I ask your forgiveness. I am very sorry to have kept you waiting, but I could not help it. I was occupied in escorting to his suburban home one of your most distinguished citizens."

And I described the boy in the cloth cap, with his box and bundle, and his patient, steady eyes, and plump little legs in the yarn stockings.

I was forgiven.

BETWEEN SHOWERS IN DORT

There be inns in Holland--not hotels, not pensions, nor stopping-places--just inns. The Bellevue at Dort is one, and the Holland Arms is another, and the--no, there are no others. Dort only boasts these two, and Dort to me is Holland.

The rivalry between these two inns has been going on for years, and it still continues. The Bellevue, fighting for place, elbowed its way years ago to the water-line, and took its stand on the river-front, where the windows and porticos could overlook the Maas dotted with boats. The Arms, discouraged, shrank back into its corner, and made up in low windows, smoking-rooms, and private bathroom--one for the whole house--what was lacking in porticos and sea view. Then followed a slight skirmish in paint,--red for the Arms and yellow-white for the Bellevue; and a flank movement of shades and curtains,--linen for the Arms and lace for the Bellevue. Scouting parties were next ordered out of porters in caps, banded with silk ribbons, bearing the names of their respective hostelries. Yacob of the Arms was to attack weary travelers on alighting from the train, and acquaint them with the delights of the downstairs bath, and the dark-room for the kodakers, all free of charge. And Johan of the Bellevue was to give minute descriptions of the boats landing in front of the dining-room windows and of the superb view of the river.

It is always summer when I arrive in Dordrecht. I don't know what happens in winter, and I don't care. The groundhog knows enough to go into his hole when the snow begins to fly, and to stay there until the sun thaws him out again. Some tourists could profit by following his example.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THROUGH STREETS EMBOWERED IN TREES]

It is summer then, and the train has rolled into the station at Dordrecht, or beside it, and the traps have been thrown out, and Peter, my boatman--he of the "Red Tub," a craft with an outline like a Dutch vrou, quite as much beam as length (we go a-sketching in this boat)--Peter, I say, who has come to the train to meet me, has swung my belongings over his shoulder, and Johan, the porter of the Bellevue, with a triumphant glance at Yacob of the Arms, has stowed the trunk on the rear platform of the street tram,--no cabs or trucks, if you please, in this town,--and the one-horse car has jerked its way around short curves and up through streets embowered in trees and paved with cobblestones scrubbed as clean as china plates, and over quaint bridges with glimpses of sluggish ca.n.a.ls and queer houses, and so on to my lodgings.

And mine host, Heer Boudier, waiting on the steps, takes me by the hand and says the same room is ready and has been for a week.

Inside these two inns, the only inns in Dort, the same rivalry exists.

But my parallels must cease. Mine own inn is the Bellevue, and my old friend of fifteen years, Heer Boudier, is host, and so loyalty compels me to omit mention of any luxuries but those to which I am accustomed in his hostelry.

Its interior has peculiar charms for me. Scrupulously clean, simple in its appointments and equipment, it is comfort itself. Tyne is responsible for its cleanliness--or rather, that particular portion of Tyne which she bares above her elbows. n.o.body ever saw such a pair of sledge-hammer arms as Tyne's on any girl outside of Holland. She is eighteen; short, square-built, solid as a Dutch cheese, fresh and rosy as an English milkmaid; moon-faced, mild-eyed as an Alderney heifer, and as strong as a three-year-old. Her back and sides are as straight as a plank; the front side is straight too. The main joint in her body is at the hips. This is so flexible that, wash-cloth in hand, she can lean over the floor without bending her knees and scrub every board in it till it shines like a Sunday dresser. She wears a snow-white cap as dainty as the finest lady's in the land; an ap.r.o.n that never seems to lose the crease of the iron, and a blue print dress bunched up behind to keep it from the slop. Her st.u.r.dy little legs are covered by gray yarn stockings which she knits herself, the feet thrust into wooden sabots. These clatter over the cobbles as she scurries about with a crab-like movement, sousing, dousing, and scrubbing as she goes; for Tyne attacks the sidewalk outside with as much gusto as she does the hall and floors.

Johan the porter moves the chairs out of Tyne's way when she begins work, and, lately, I have caught him lifting her bucket up the front steps--a wholly unnecessary proceeding when Tyne's muscular developments are considered. Johan and I had a confidential talk one night, when he brought the mail to my room,--the room on the second floor overlooking the Maas,--in which certain personal statements were made. When I spoke to Tyne about them the next day, she looked at me with her big blue eyes, and then broke into a laugh, opening her mouth so wide that every tooth in her head flashed white (they always reminded me somehow of peeled almonds). With a little bridling twist of her head she answered that--but, of course, this was a strictly confidential communication, and of so entirely private a nature that no gentleman under the circ.u.mstances would permit a single word of it to--

Johan is taller than Tyne, but not so thick through. When he meets you at the station, with his cap and band in his hand, his red hair trimmed behind as square as the end of a whisk-broom, his thin, parenthesis legs and Vienna guardsman waist,--each detail the very opposite, you will note, from Tyne's,--you recall immediately one of George Boughton's typical Dutchmen. The only thing lacking is his pipe; he is too busy for that.

When he dons his dress suit for dinner, and bending over your shoulder asks, in his best English: "Mynheer, don't it now de feesh you haf?"

you lose sight of Boughton's Dutchman and see only the cosmopolitan.

The transformation is due entirely to continental influences--Dort being one of the main highways between London and Paris--influences so strong that even in this water-logged town on the Maas, bonnets are beginning to replace caps, and French shoes sabots.

The guests that Johan serves at this inn of my good friend Boudier are as odd looking as its interior. They line both sides and the two ends of the long table. Stout Germans in horrible clothes, with stouter wives in worse; Dutchmen from up-country in brown coats and green waistcoats; clerks off on a vacation with kodaks and Cook's tickets; bicyclists in knickerbockers; painters, with large kits and small handbags, who talk all the time and to everybody; gray-whiskered, red-faced Englishmen, with absolutely no conversation at all, who prove to be distinguished persons attended by their own valets, and on their way to Aix or the Engadine, now that the salmon-fishing in Norway is over; school teachers from America, just arrived from Antwerp or Rotterdam, or from across the channel by way of Harwich, their first stopping-place really since they left home--one traveling-dress and a black silk in the bag; all the kinds and conditions and sorts of people who seek out precious little places like Dort, either because they are cheap or comfortable, or because they are known to be picturesque.

I sought out Dort years ago because it was untouched by the hurry that makes life miserable, and the shams that make it vulgar, and I go back to it now every year of my life, in spite of other foreign influences.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GOSSIPS LEAN IN THE DOORWAYS]

And there is no real change in fifteen years. Its old trees still nod over the sleepy ca.n.a.ls in the same sleepy way they have done, no doubt, for a century. The rooks--the same rooks, they never die--still swoop in and out of the weather-stained arches high up in the great tower of the Groote Kerk, the old twelfth-century church, the tallest in all Holland; the big-waisted Dutch luggers with rudders painted a.r.s.enic green--what would painters do without this green?--doze under the trees, their mooring lines tied to the trunks; the girls and boys, with arms locked, a dozen together, clatter over the cobbles, singing as they walk; the steamboats land and hurry on--"Fop Smit's boats" the signs read--it is pretty close, but I am not part owner in the line; the gossips lean in the doorways or under the windows banked with geraniums and nasturtiums; the c.u.mbersome state carriages with the big ungainly horses with untrimmed manes and tails--there are only five of these carriages in all Dordrecht--wait in front of the great houses eighty feet wide and four stories high, some dating as far back as 1512, and still occupied by descendants of the same families; the old women in ivory black, with dabs of Chinese white for sabots and caps, push the same carts loaded with Hooker's green vegetables from door to door; the town crier rings his bell; the watchman calls the hour.

Over all bends the ever-changing sky, one hour close-drawn, gray-lined with slanting slashes of blinding rain, the next piled high with great domes of silver-white clouds inlaid with turquoise blue or hemmed in by low-lying ranges of purple peaks capped with gold.

I confess that an acute sense of disappointment came over me when I first saw these gray ca.n.a.ls, rain-varnished streets, and rows of green trees. I recognized at a glance that it was not my Holland; not the Holland of my dreams; not the Holland of Mesdag nor Poggenbeck nor Kever. It was a fresher, sweeter, more wholesome land, and with a more breathable air. These Dutch painters had taught me to look for dull, dirty skies, soggy wharves, and dismal perspectives of endless dikes.

They had shown me countless windmills, scattered along stretches of wind-swept moors backed by lowering skies, cold gray streets, quaint, leanover houses, and smudgy, grimy interiors. They had enveloped all this in the stifling, murky atmosphere of a western city slowly strangling in clouds of coal smoke.

These Dutch artists were, perhaps, not alone in this falsification. It is one of the peculiarities of modern art that many of its masters cater to the taste of a public who want something that _is not_ in preference to something that _is_. Ziem, for instance, had, up to the time of my enlightenment, taught me to love an equally untrue and impossible Venice--a Venice all red and yellow and deep ultra-marine blue--a Venice of unbuildable palaces and blazing red walls.

I do not care to say so aloud, where I can be heard over the way, but if you will please come inside my quarters, and shut the door and putty up the keyhole, and draw down the blinds, I will whisper in your ear that my own private opinion is that even Turner himself would have been an infinitely greater artist had he built his pictures on Venice instead of building them on Turner. I will also be courageous enough to a.s.sert that the beauty and dignity of Venetian architecture--an architecture which has delighted many appreciative souls for centuries--finds no place in his canvases, either in detail or in ma.s.s. The details may be unimportant, for the soft vapor of the lagoons ofttimes conceals them, but the correct outline of the ma.s.s--that is, for instance, the true proportion of the dome of the Salute, that incomparable, incandescent pearl, or the vertical line of the Campanile compared to the roofs of the connecting palaces--should never be ignored, for they are as much a part of Venice, the part that makes for beauty, as the shimmering light of the morning or the glory of its sunsets. So it is that when most of us for the first time reach the water-gates of Venice, the most beautiful of all cities by the sea, we feel a certain shock and must begin to fall in love with a new sweetheart.

So with many painters of the Holland school--not the old Dutch school of landscape painters, but the more modern group of men who paint their native skies with zinc-white toned with London fog, or mummy dust and bitumen. It is all very artistic and full of "tone," but it is not Holland.

There is Clays, for instance. Of all modern painters Clays has charmed and wooed us best with certain phases of Holland life, particularly the burly brown boats lying at anchor, their red and white sails reflected in the water. I love these boats of Clays. They are superbly drawn, strong in color, and admirably painted; the water treatment, too, is beyond criticism. But where are they in Holland? I know Holland from the Zuyder Zee to Rotterdam, but I have never yet seen one of Clays's boats in the original wood.

Thus by reason of such smeary, up and down fairy tales in paint have we gradually become convinced that vague trees, and black houses with staring patches of whitewash, and Vand.y.k.e brown roofs are thoroughly characteristic of Holland, and that the blessed sun never shines in this land of sabots.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DRENCHED LEAVES QUIVERING]

But doesn't it rain? Yes, about half the time, perhaps three quarters of the time. Well, now that I think of it, about all the time. But not continuously; only in intermittent downpours, floods, gushes of water--not once a day but every half hour. Then comes the quick drawing of a gray curtain from a wide expanse of blue, framing ranges of snow-capped c.u.muli; streets swimming in great pools; drenched leaves quivering in dazzling sunlight, and millions of raindrops flashing like diamonds.

II

But Peter, my boatman, cap in hand, is waiting on the cobbles outside the inn door. He has served me these many years. He is a wiry, thin, pinch-faced Dutchman, of perhaps sixty, who spent his early life at sea as man-o'-war's-man, common sailor, and then mate, and his later years at home in Dort, picking up odd jobs of ferriage or stevedoring, or making early gardens. While on duty he wears an old white traveling-cap pulled over his eyes, and a flannel shirt without collar or tie, and sail-maker's trousers. These trousers are caught at his hips by a leather strap supporting a sheath which holds his knife. He cuts everything with this knife, from apples and navy plug to ship's cables and telegraph wire. His clothes are waterproof; they must be, for no matter how hard it rains, Peter is always dry. The water may pour in rivulets from off his cap, and run down his forehead and from the end of his gargoyle of a nose, but no drop ever seems to wet his skin. When it rains the fiercest, I, of course, retreat under the poke-bonnet awning made of cotton duck stretched over barrel hoops that protects the stern of my boat, but Peter never moves. This Dutch rain does not in any way affect him. It is like the Jersey mosquito--it always spares the natives.

Peter speaks two languages, both Dutch. He says that one is English, but he cannot prove it--n.o.body can. When he opens his mouth you know all about his ridiculous pretensions. He says--"Mynheer, dot ma.n.u.s ist er blowdy rock." He has learned this expression from the English sailors unloading coal at the big docks opposite Pappendrecht, and he has incorporated this much of their slang into his own nut-cracking dialect. He means of course "that man is a b.l.o.o.d.y rogue." He has a dozen other phrases equally obscure.

Peter's mission this first morning after my arrival is to report that the good ship Red Tub is now lying in the harbor fully equipped for active service. That her aft awning has been hauled taut over its hoops; that her lockers of empty cigar boxes (receptacles for brushes) have been clewed up; the cocoa-matting rolled out the whole length of her keel, and finally that the water bucket and wooden chair (I use a chair instead of an easel) have been properly stowed.

Before the next raincloud spills over its edges, we must loosen the painter from the iron ring rusted tight in the square stone in the wharf, man the oars, and creep under the little bridge that binds Boudier's landing to the sidewalk over the way, and so set our course for the open Maas. For I am in search of Dutch boats to-day, as near like Clays's as I can find. I round the point above the old India warehouses, I catch sight of the topmasts of two old luggers anch.o.r.ed in midstream, their long red pennants flattened against the gray sky.

The wind is fresh from the east, filling the sails of the big windmills blown tight against their whirling arms. The fishing-smacks lean over like dipping gulls; the yellow water of the Maas is flecked with wavy lines of beer foam.

The good ship Red Tub is not adapted to outdoor sketching under these conditions. The poke-bonnet awning acts as a wind-drag that no amount of hard pulling can overcome. So I at once convene the Board of Strategy, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Jansen, Red Tub Navy, in the chair. That distinguished naval expert rises from his water-soaked seat on the cocoa-matting outside the poke bonnet, sweeps his eye around the horizon, and remarks sententiously:--