Arnold Bennett

“ 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. ”

“ I have not yet visited in the Velsa any Continental port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie in wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind. Assuredly a Thames barge—said to be the largest craft in the world sailed by a man and a boy—in full course on the Blackwater is a noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of enterprise in transport. ”

“ It was in the dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it as great ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant. There was a vast fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid imperceptibly past the mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the multitudinous masts for the mast of the Velsa. Her long Dutch streamer was ever unmistakable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Krasnopolshy’s—a town, not a café—is said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It isn’t; but it is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a million people.
In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the quality which above all others a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and boil over into its public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of its shops. ”

“ A few miserable tourists were in fact drinking cold, bad tea on a windy terrace overlooking a distant horizon, far beyond which lay Copenhagen. We swallowed the tea, the driver swallowed beer, and we started hack. We had no overcoats, and the Baltic evening was cold. Trams overtook us flying at a tremendous pace into Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame horse. In the dusk we reached once more the desirable city, whose women never seemed more fair to us than they did then. This adventure taught us that the yachtsman must be prepared for any adventure, even the wildest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You can scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue of a nonentity in Holland, because there are scarcely any statues.
Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland. Its architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively immanent in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of it in the mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer. Amsterdam has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever passed through the head of a stock-broker. ”

“ CHAPTER IX—A day’s SAIL ALTHOUGH there is a lively pleasure in discovering even the dullest and smallest towns and villages, the finest experience offered by the Baltic is the savor of the Baltic itself in a long day’s sail. I mean a day of fourteen hours at least, from six in the morning till eight at night, through varied seascapes and landscapes and varied weather. As soon as the yacht leaves harbor in the bracing chill of sunrise she becomes a distinct entity, independent, self-reliant. ”

“ The name on the chart! And then the haven is descried, and a ring of masts with fluttering rags. And then the lighthouse and the roofs detach themselves, and the actual mouth of the haven appears. Twilight falls; the engine is moderated; the deck-hand stands by with a pole. Very slowly we slide in, and the multitudinous bright tints of the fishing-smacks are startlingly gay even in the dusk. The skipper glances rapidly about him, and yells out in Dutch to a fisherman, who replies in Danish. ”

“ Scores of dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a wise dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and learned the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the flat Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray purple; and as we approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles, we felt that we knew Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail to be waiting for us in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to other shores. ”

“ The Hague gas-works are like a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this vast, clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is scrupulously in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the city and see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes, when at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising at five-thirty a.m. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it, is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle affords esthetic pleasure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced Danes, who had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom they chattered in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and incomprehensible. Also she was full of original Danish food, and especially of marvelous and mysterious sandwiches, which, with small quantities of champagne, we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imitated from Atlantic liners. Despite the east wind, which still held, that steamer reached Esbjerg in the twinkling of an eye. ”

“ The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town of fine architecture, is that they should both—the Ryks and the municipal—be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs, and the result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michelangelo often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects and artists more skilled than he in pleasing city councils and building-committees muddled away opportunities which he would have glorified ”

“ The sun is hot, the saloon skylight warm to the touch. You throw off a jersey. The tumbling water is a scale of deep blues, splendid against the brass of the bollard and the reddishness of the spars. The engine is running without a “knock”; the sails are nicely filled; the patent log is twirling aft. A small rainbow shines steadily in the foam thrown up from the bows, and a great rainbow stretches across all heaven, with its own ghost parallel to it. Among the large, soft clouds rags of dark cloud are uneasily floating. ”