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Transcriber’s note:
Clicking on the color illustrations will open a larger version.
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DUTCH BULBS AND GARDENS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
GARDENS
OF ENGLAND
BY E. T. COOK
WITH 20 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR BY
BEATRICE PARSONS
A. AND C. BLACK,
SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: HET LOO]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DUTCH BULBS
AND GARDENS
PAINTED BY
MIMA NIXON
DESCRIBED BY
UNA SILBERRAD AND SOPHIE LYALL
[Illustration]
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1909
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
MY DEAREST FRIEND
GERTRUDE CROFTON
IN MEMORY OF HAPPY DAYS SPENT IN HOLLAND
WHICH WE SAW TOGETHER FOR
THE FIRST TIME
MIMA NIXON.
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PREFACE
Miss Nixon wishes me to present her humble duty and thanks to Her
Majesty, the Queen of the Netherlands, for graciously honouring her
with the permission to make drawings of Her Majesty’s Summer Palace and
Gardens at Het Loo.
Miss Nixon also wishes me to thank His Excellency Baron Sistema van
Grövestins for his kindness in procuring for her the privilege of
access to the Royal Gardens at Het Loo, and to thank the Rt. Hon. Sir
Horace Rumbold, Bart., P.C., G.C.B., G.C.M.G., for his kind help.
Her thanks are also due to Mr. W. H. Wind, Her Majesty’s Head Gardener
at Het Loo; to Miss van der Laan, Bennebroek; and to Messrs. Tubergen,
Kersten, Krelager, Roozen, and the other growers at Haarlem.
I wish to thank Mr. Thomas Hoog of Haarlem, who helped me in the
compiling of the following pages by supplying much valuable
information, which I trust I have not too greatly mishandled.
UNA L. SILBERRAD.
_March 1, 1909._
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CONTENTS
BY UNA L. SILBERRAD
PAGE
CHAPTER I
ON GETTING THERE 1
CHAPTER II
CROCUS AND EARLY SPRING FLOWERS 28
CHAPTER III
HYACINTH OR IRIS? 47
CHAPTER IV
SOME OLD FAVOURITES AND NEW 68
CHAPTER V
THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE BULB GARDENS 83
CHAPTER VI
BULB BARNS, NAMES, AND GROWERS 104
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APPENDICES
BY SOPHIE LYALL
PAGE
I
HYACINTH CULTURE AT HAARLEM IN THE EIGHTEENTH 121
CENTURY
II
THE TULIP TRADE, FROM DE KONING’S “HISTORY OF 168
HAARLEM” (1635)
III
THE HYACINTH TRADE, FROM DE KONING’S “TAFEREEL 171
DER STAD HAARLEM” (1808)
INDEX 173
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Het Loo _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. The “Berceau,” Het Loo 8
3. Palace Gardens, Het Loo 16
4. Azaleas, Het Loo 24
5. The Return of the Storks 28
6. The Promise of Spring 32
7. A Crocus Field 40
8. Hyacinths scattered on the Sand 48
9. “In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue, and 56
white, like sapphire, pearl, and rich
embroidery”
10. Spanish Irises 64
11. A Bulb Farm near Overveen 68
12. “They spring, they bud, they blossome fresh 72
and faire, and decke the world with their rich
pompous showes”
13. Bulb Time, Haarlem 78
14. Tulips in their Prime 84
15. “Here are tulips for you—white, for the 88
bridal or the burial”
16. “Whose leaves with their crimson glow Hide 94
the heart that lies burning and black below”
17. Darwin Tulips 100
18. A Bulb House 104
19. Flower-Market, Haarlem 108
20. Hyacinth Flowers going to Market 112
21. A Bulb-Grower’s Garden 116
22. “When Spring unlocks the flowers to paint 128
the laughing soil”
23. A Boatload of Fragrance 144
24. A Dutch Garden in Spring 160
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DUTCH BULBS & GARDENS
CHAPTER I
ON GETTING THERE
Undoubtedly the way to go to the Bulb Gardens of Holland is to go the
way by which the bulbs come to England. Or at least follow that route
to a certain extent—the bulbs usually make part of the inland journey
in their own country by canal boat, neither a very possible nor a very
comfortable proceeding for the average traveller. But for the rest,
their route is the one for those who have leisure and who want to get
to the gardens in the most suitable way.
One boards a little Dutch steamer at the Tower Stairs, a steamer that
seems in the greatest hurry to be off, but never is, though everyone
and everything, including the steam escape, are very busy till it
finally shrieks itself under the Tower Bridge and so down the river.
These steamers are sometimes slightingly referred to as cargo boats,
and certainly the bulbs, in their clean white packing cases, come to
England that way; and when they are not coming, Dutch cheeses in
quantity and other things take their place. But the passenger
accommodation has much to recommend it. I remember a large deck cabin,
much larger and lighter than a good deal of the first-class
accommodation on the great Indian and Australian liners. I remember
sheets of stout Low Country linen, reminiscent in their scent of
woodruff of the Spanish mahogany dower chests where housewives lay up
their gear with the aromatic herb. I remember a snug place with a
swinging lamp and lockers, more suggestive of the cabin of the
“Schooner _Hesperus_,” when “the skipper had taken his little daughter
to bear him company,” than the saloon of a cross-Channel steamer. It is
true the food is Dutch, but if, as not infrequently happens, one is
sole passenger, one has it when and where one pleases, which is a
compensation. It is true, too, there is no stewardess, and not often
anyone who speaks much English on board, and that the journey takes
rather long, but these are trifles.
By choosing the right tide, one drops down the river in the afternoon,
in itself an interesting and instructive thing; spends the night at
sea, which if one has to go to sea seems the best time to spend there;
and, if it is summer, sees the piers of Ymuenden when sea and sky look
like the two halves of a pink pearl in the dawn. After Ymuenden one is
in the Great Canal of Amsterdam, and it is a bad sailor who can then
find reason to object to the motion or vibration. The latter appears
principally to be connected with the steam whistle, which gives notice
of approach to railway bridges, and the former to be rather conspicuous
by its absence. Children driving goats to pasture and early astir
pedestrians seem as if they could easily outdistance the very steady
and matronly pace of the little steamer. But it is quite suitable,
everything else on the water moves at the same pace, which agreeably
allows of greeting and conversation with occasional sister craft, even
allows of learning what they have for breakfast on board. And no doubt
it is necessary,—the banks which shut the canal from the land, usually
lying below the water-level, are very soft; even as it is, dredgers,
those most fascinating craft of childhood, are eternally at work.
It appears to be the cautious custom of the country not to open the
swing railway bridges within twenty minutes of the scheduled time of a
train’s coming. As the trains do not invariably keep time, there are
occasionally long waits for the steamers, which, being privately owned,
wait the good pleasure of the State-owned railways. But it does not
very much matter, there is the better chance to look around and see the
country, which is so very flat here that there is a great deal of it to
be seen; and so wide and peaceful that it puts to rest the sense of
hurry. One who goes to the bulb gardens does well to put that sense to
rest, for, seen hastily, run through in a few hours or a day at most,
they produce little but an impression of sheets of gorgeous colour,
which might possibly have been more beautiful had they been otherwise
arranged. Time is wanted to see them, the leisureliness which regards
them as gardens rather than as so many acres of scarlet, blue, or
white, and the opportunity of knowing a few of the flowers
individually. It is for this reason, among others, and as a suitable
preparation to the leisurely observation, that a man does well to go to
the gardens the way the bulbs come; and does well to possess his soul
in patience, while the Dutch captain attends the pleasure of the man
who minds the bridge, and while the steamer creeps up to Amsterdam.
The national virtue of Holland, the Holland one sees from the canal, is
industry; not energy exactly, certainly not ‘hustle’ or any kindred
thing, but industry, coupled with a neatness which keeps even the
ditches tidy, and does not allow of that inalienable right of the
English rural dweller, the garden rubbish-heap. The Dutch strike one as
more industrious than anything else in the world, unless perhaps ants,
to a community of which, it must be admitted, they bear some
resemblance. The national ideal, at least in the bulb district, is
cleanliness. About the highest praise to be bestowed on anything is
that it is clean. A fine tulip bulb in its shining yellow-brown skin is
extolled as “so clean”; the curious sandy soil in which the bulbs grow
is spoken of with pride as always clean; the great compliment to be
paid to a bulb barn is that it is clean. Possibly one of the advantages
of the growers’ work is that it is clean.
It is, I believe, customary to speak of Amsterdam as the Venice of the
North. For one who has not seen Venice it is impossible to draw a
comparison, but it seems difficult to imagine much resemblance between
them—beyond the fact that both possess canals and houses and history.
Amsterdam somehow reminds one of Dickens’ novels, it is immensely
interesting, rather crowded, real, busy, homely, and genuine; not
suggestive of devastating passions or high romance exactly, but very
comfortable and wholesome. One would expect it to dine early, to attend
to business, and have a substantial supper. This is not meant to imply
that everyone in Amsterdam does these things, only that that is the
general impression produced by the town. One can perfectly understand
Amsterdam being the diamond mart of the world; but one cannot imagine
an Amsterdamer ruining himself to buy a parure for some fair woman’s
caprice; or an Amsterdamess jeopardising her immortal soul to secure
some special jewel. One no more expects it than one expects the Jews,
who are the art dealers and bijou connoisseurs of the world, to be the
producers of these same articles. Not that one thinks the less of them
on that account. Artists and romancists and subjects of the grand
passion, though no doubt adding to the joy of nations, make indifferent
folk to live with; the sturdy man of business and the shrewd and kindly
citizen might be a deal better for everyday use—and most lives consist
principally of such usings. In Amsterdam one can perfectly understand
the famous struggle with Spain and some of the difficulties of the Boer
War. But one cannot help feeling that, just as the French Revolution
and the ’45 are not in the nature of the people, neither are the ways
and doings of Renaissance Italy.
From Amsterdam one goes by train to Haarlem, capital of the bulb
country; and if one holds any hearsay opinions as to the unexcitable
nature of the Dutch people, one corrects them on the way. Phlegmatic in
big matters they may be, but in small ones—No. It is only necessary to
observe them seeing each other off at the railway station or starting
one of their not too expeditious trains to realise that. The excitement
of getting the people in, of arranging seats when in, closing windows
and placing the inordinate quantity of packages everyone seems to
carry, is astonishing to the Englishman. So too, rather, is the amount
of help and service required by the exceedingly capable Holland women.
A Holland lady never seems to think of opening a carriage door for
herself; one imagines she would almost sooner go past the desired
station than do so, though such a catastrophe could not well happen,
for, in good time, she uplifts her voice and excitedly calls upon all
and sundry to let her out, if no one has, unasked, come to do it. She
never attempts to board the train without at least one assistant; if
she be stout, two. In the latter case it is not altogether unnecessary,
for the steps are steep, the door narrow, and the stations, like others
on the Continent, guiltless of platforms; the difficulties of getting a
really fat and baggage-laden lady in are considerable. Inside the train
she is very helpless about her belongings and prepared to cast herself
upon the kindness of any or all men; outside Mevrouw is as capable as
any woman in the world. The peculiarity probably arises from the fact
that Holland, in some respects, is still rather mid-Victorian; the
women, at all events, cling to the ideal of feminine helplessness in
public places which was counted becoming in that era.
Haarlem, it is said, is behind the rest of Holland; with what truth I
do not know, I know no other part half so well. It is a town not quite
like any other, so quiet and bright, so small scale busy with its own
concerns, so essentially cosy. There is there a feeling of attending to
your own business, and the price of meat mattering more than the
Messina earthquake (as, indeed, it is conceivable it may to a good many
people); and also a feeling of comfort and the settled home life; the
hearth swept and the children coming down to tea. The whole town is
intersected by canals, the which, always busy and doing away with a
good deal of road traffic, may help to produce the quiet, bright, yet
active feeling. The houses, many of them, are right on to the street,
with windows low, so that one can hardly help seeing in and having a
momentary and intimate glimpse of the lives of the inhabitants. This
may help to give the comfortable homely feeling—it is hard to say,
really impossible to say, what produces and wherein lies the spirit and
atmosphere of a town.
[Illustration: The “BERCEAU,” HET LOO]
At Haarlem station it is customary for those who have come in the bulb
flowering time of April and May to hire a carriage and go the route
prescribed by the driver; thus, without leaving their seats, seeing the
gardens, and carrying away the impression of a patchwork quilt of
flowers. An arrangement of foursquare bits of colour, separated from
each other by as yet scantily-leafed hedges, and, here and there,
intersected by pieces of ground resting from bulb culture, and either
bare or green with vegetables, which, from sheer exhaustion, if not
contrariness, the eye is inclined to prefer to the gorgeous flower
patches. But that is not the way to see the bulb gardens. It is better,
for one who has leisure, to go first in early summer, when the great
mass of flowers is over, and only the later and fewer bulbs are in
bloom; when there is opportunity to know them as individuals, and
appreciate the exquisite contrast of iris colours and green hedges, and
to see to full advantage ranunculus, and the early blooming gladioli,
and the hundred varieties of the lily tribe. To see them, as the
unaccustomed eye cannot see them when it first meets flowers in sheets,
field after field of colour. In June, then, come to Haarlem; there take
a tram, and do not forget that the chances are some one in the vehicle
will understand English very well indeed. And when the tram has come as
near as may be to the destination, walk the rest of the way to the
house of the grower. To see the bulb flowers without the grower is not
to see them. On arrival at the house there is usually a meal first. It
is always mid-day “coffee-drinking” in my memories, and there is never
much talk of the flowers at it; questions, rather, about people in
England and Holland, and perhaps about fashions and food, and the
length of the winter, and the health of Mevrouw. After that there is a
rest, during which Mevrouw offers cordials and home-made liquors of a
most excellent order, and den Heer finishes important letters. After
that, walk forth to the flowers.
The gardens are sometimes rather far from the house, and often not very
near each other, one man owning or renting several at considerable
distances apart. Some of the younger men use bicycles to get from one
to the other, some of the elder tricycles, which seems a doubtful
expedient, seeing the nature of the roads. One old man who used the
latter method, and wished to try the former, wept tears of sheer rage
when his wife and family interfered, for the sake of his safety, to
prevent him from learning to ride the swifter machine. And, being Dutch
not French, he was not content with weeping, but proceeded to frustrate
their well-meant interference. Of an evening, when by his own account
he was late working in the office, he took his son’s bicycle to a bulb
barn, and, by the light of a lantern, rode it up and down the centre
aisle. He damaged himself a good deal from time to time, and the
bicycle somewhat; but he was not discovered. He explained his own
injuries in various ingenious, if not strictly truthful, ways; and of
the bicycle’s he was never suspected, although he showed himself
generous in subscribing to the cost of repairing the mysteriously
caused damage. He spent most of the evenings of one winter in this way.
It took him all that time to at all master the machine. He was less apt
than determined, and, had he not been bent on proving his independence,
he might have given up. But he was bent, very seriously—one knows the
concentration with which he ground up and down the barn aisle night
after night, peering with short-sighted eyes for unseen obstacles among
the lantern shadows, and colliding with the same corner at the same
time each turn. In the spring he bought a second-hand bicycle. He was
too good a man of business to risk the price of a new one on his own
proficiency as a rider on the roads; moreover, he wanted a machine with
solid tyres, he preferred the substantiality. On his purchase he rode
proudly to his own door, and dismounted in time to save himself from
falling off at his wife’s feet. He is now occasionally to be seen on
the roads, a proud and perspiring man. It is true, he does not ride his
bicycle very much when his wife is not about to protest and object, but
he is always (verbally at least) an enthusiast about it. It is his
opinion that the roads of Holland are the most excellent in the world
for cycles. They are, he says, no matter what the weather, always so
clean. That is true, clean they are; but good!—it is a matter of
opinion. There is a foot-wide brick track in the centre, deep sand
everywhere else; at least such are the roads to the bulb gardens I know
best.
But in den Heer’s case part of the bulb land was round the house. He
had other farther away. Land so near Haarlem is too valuable for a man
to own all he wants there. It would, of course, be to this near garden
he would go when the important letters were finished and the visitor
rested. It is no impressionist picture of colour splashes to be got
there, but detailed, like an old Dutch painting. You do not see the
stretches of blue and yellow iris, you see the flowers. They are
individuals to den Heer, not masses. He knows them, or, at least,
representatives among them. He stops before the long strip of new
iris—mixed sorts raised from seed, in the hope of producing some
variety worth saving and propagating.
“Ah, Ah!” he will purr as he touches some one among them, “here we have
a good flower, the violet—the true violet—observe the eye.”
You observe the flower, and the three plush spots on the lower petals,
and do not perceive it to be very different, or, to tell the truth,
very superior to anything you have seen before. But he perceives it and
has already marked the plant.
“This we will multiply,” he says, “in time you will see this in the
catalogues. You shall give it a name.”
You give one, the name of the boat that brought you to Holland perhaps,
or perhaps “Amethyst,” in honour of the purple tone which den Heer
perceives, although you do not. And then you turn to admire another
flower, a perfect blue, which seems very beautiful. But the chances are
your admiration is misplaced.
“It is nothing,” den Heer says with a shrug, at the same time cutting
the bloom for you with the smallest and sharpest of knives. “There are
many as fine, many better, the _Darling_, the _Solfatare_, both more
blue. Did this, now, show any rosy markings, that would be something
indeed in _Iris hispanica_.”
It no doubt would, though possibly not an improvement in the eyes of
the uninitiated. If you are of this opinion, you do not say so, but
follow den Heer among the flowers, noticing how one here and there is
marked out for the honour of multiplication. A somewhat remote honour,
which will not bring them into catalogue fame yet; may not bring them
at all. For this reason the naming of the purple iris is hardly
important, little more than a graceful compliment to the namer. The
chances are rather in favour of the flower not being found worthy of
founding a family to use the name; and even if it were, like the
thousands of babies daily named, there is small likelihood of its
achieving great fame.
Beyond the irises, divided by a high hornbeam screen, there are white
gladioli; from the distance little but an irregular white blur in a
small field they do not fill; but near spotless flowers, bending like a
bevy of shy girls at their first communion, or novices waiting their
bridal with the Church. Den Heer will stop to tell you which is the
“true Bride,” the perfect snow-white flower with no suspicion of purple
on the stamen tips or faintly tinging the depth of the throat. He will
tell you how the beautiful _Bride_, no matter how carefully grown and
selected, has a tendency in these faint colour stains to show its
remote ancestor, the ugly little magenta flower of the Canary Islands.
He will also pick out for you the full flower head, twenty florets on a
stalk, five open at once, a perfection by no means always obtained.
By the white gladioli is a great patch of the taller and later blooming
sort, not yet fully out, but already showing hints of their gorgeous
colours, salmon and scarlet, pale yellow and delicate mauve. All the
many tints to be found among them since the discovery of varieties at
the Cape (where, by the way, the corms are eaten by the Hottentots) has
allowed of endless crossings and hybridisings, and has removed them in
beauty far from the few indigenous European sorts. Those of which
Parkinson wrote with the satisfaction of one catching a famous rival
tripping: “Gerard mistaketh the French kind for the Italian.”
In the ground which surrounds the grower’s house are to be found the
choice varieties. This ground is not often divided into big fields
devoted to some one or two kinds of bulbs only. It is more usually
given up to smaller patches of special flowers, or new flowers, things
which need care, or watching, or else are experiments. It is here there
is likely to have been first seen green ixias (_Ixia viridiflora_) in
bloom, and the strange sound of their dry rustling heard,—the sound
which, taken in conjunction with their colour, the blue-green of
mildew, is somehow suggestive of Jeremiah’s valley of dry bones. Here,
too, will be Californian tulips (_Calochortus_), and the rare great
iris of Persia (_Iris Susiana_), and other things in their season;
always much more than can be seen before Mevrouw, standing at the house
door, claps her hands to tell that dinner is ready.
[Illustration: PALACE GARDENS, HET LOO]
To go to the more distant gardens, it is well to choose the morning, if
it is spring, the time of the bulbs which have made Holland famous. A
windy time, this, in Holland, one well understands then the advantage
of pollarding the trees. Also one understands the necessity of the high
hedges or screens which separate the garden into squarish patches. They
are sometimes of beech, more often hornbeam, they quite enclose the
piece of land, only at each corner there is a square-cut gateless gap,
which makes a large area, seen from a distance, suggestive of a
gigantic maze. In hyacinth time they are, of course, quite bare of
leaves, unless one counts a few yellow ones of last year clinging here
and there, a beautiful sombre background to the astonishing vivid
delicacy of the flowers. It is a wonderful sight, more especially when
one stands among them—rows of wax pink hyacinths, each perfect and each
set in its circle of bright green leaves; behind, the purple brown of
the bare hedge; beyond, a glimpse of blue flowers, or pale yellow, or
still more dazzling white. A sight wonderful when one stands among
them, but also to be appreciated afterwards from a distance—preferably
from the windows of the gardener’s little house. If the wind is very
cold and den Heer is going to be very long in conference with the
gardener, it is possible that, after a certain time, one can admire
them more from within over such coffee as the gardener’s wife makes. A
cup of such coffee, a footstool filled with hot charcoal, and a chair
in the most shining kitchen possible to conceive of, are not to be
despised, while den Heer, outside, talks about the cutting down of the
hyacinth flowers.
To us who grow hyacinths in pots or in beds, where the failure of one
is like a missing front tooth, the cutting down of the flowers seems
almost a ruthless thing. We admit that it must be necessary, or it
would not be done, but we feel that the men who do it ought to have
some compunction about it. Though why they should be expected to feel
it more than the mowers who cut the equally beautiful flowers in the
English hay-fields does not appear. The bulbs in Holland are grown for
their roots as much as are carrots and potatoes, as much as the grass
is grown for hay. It is the poet, not the mower, who sighs over the
flowers of the grass that perish; and the poet, if he happens to own
hay-fields, does not hesitate to give orders for the cutting at the
proper time. And the mower, if he has an eye for beauty, admires the
flowers, even though he says nothing about it, and cuts them down to
order. A boat-load of cut hyacinth flowers, with their beauty, and
their scent, and their cutting off at highest perfection may touch the
imagination more than a four-ounce bottle of heavy red-brown oil, which
represents the life and fragrance of half a square mile of jasmine
flowers. But it should not, if the jasmine was only grown that the oil
might be made, the hyacinths equally are only grown that their roots
may be fine and saleable; and when their well-being demands the cutting
of the flowers there is no sacrifice in their going, for to this end
they grew and matured and came to flower.
There is yet one other way of going to see a bulb garden, for those who
are fortunate enough to know a grower who owns one at a so situated
spot. Den Heer owned one, and on a June afternoon we went to it, his
son, den Heer Karel, and I. We started from a small quay in Haarlem,
travelling by boat—a boat not so much bigger than a barge, which
carried a miscellaneous cargo, and a captain and crew—two souls
inclusive. Captain was clean, crew rather dirty, for a Dutchman, but
both very polite. They raised their hats on the slightest
provocation,—it would really have saved trouble if they had kept them
off altogether while I was about, and shook hands most formally with
all quayside friends before casting off. There was one other passenger,
an old peasant woman, with a beautiful head-dress with spiral gold
wires standing out over her ears. She hugged a small goat all the
voyage, as if she were afraid of its jumping overboard, or eating the
green stuff which was part of her luggage, though, since she sat on
that and she was a voluminous person, it is difficult to see how it
could have managed to do so. There was not much to sit on besides one’s
luggage if one had any, or that part of the cargo which was smooth
enough and firm enough to provide a seat. It is possible den Heer Karel
did not quite like the expedition. He had a feeling that it “was
singular,” and if there is one thing a Dutchman does not like, it is to
look singular. Maybe it is this clinging to the conventionalities,
which we have rather lost, which gives one the feeling of having gone
back some decades when one is among them.
But den Heer Karel was goodness itself, and, without a word of protest,
made the expedition. We steamed down the canal—a narrow canal lying in
the old part of the town, where old purple-red houses, with green
shutters, and tales haunting their every doorway and steep gable-end,
came down to the water’s edge; where broad brown craft lay crowded
along the water side, and red-capped men lowered barrels from upper
stories, and wooden-shod women, with their skirts girt high, clattered
down the step, which alone stood between their back doors and the
waterway, to fill empty pails, or empty full ones. A life and a folk
strangely suggestive, at least to the foreigner, of those of Haarlem
city in the days of the Spanish occupation.
The boat did not go fast that June day; indeed, once afloat in her, it
was possible to realise at what a really superior speed Amsterdam had
been approached on the great canal. It was also now possible to think
of that canal as “great.” It was very great in comparison to this one.
But even at this rate of progress Haarlem was left behind before very
long, and on either side was green country. A very straight white road
ran by the canal on one side. It was by this on his bicycle den Heer
Karel would have gone to the bulb garden had he been alone. A remark on
the subject drew from him the assurance that it was much cooler to go
this way, and that the glaring white dust of the road often hurt his
eyes. The which, with its dwelling on the one point of the journey
agreeable to him, seems more really graceful than an assurance of
delight in it; this even if he had not added, “besides, then I should
not have had company, and now I have, which is pleasant.” There is a
certain sincere politeness among the Dutch, which is attractive in its
simplicity, and at its best recalls the Quakers.
I have been told that the village to which I went that day is
surprisingly wicked. The same has been told of every village, except
one, with which I have come in contact in England. Possibly, usually,
with some truth, though the surprise may have lain more in the nature
of the surprisee—it is hard not to think of picturesque cottages and
green fields as Gardens of Eden—than in the outrageous iniquity of the
villagers. Certainly den Heer Karel was no connoisseur of wickedness in
any of its branches; he would be likely to find surprising most
varieties that came to his notice among the village people whom he
individually knew. His uncle, who was the pastor of the village, was of
something the same sort, though, so the nephew said, he did not know
half the bad things which were done there. The which was easy to
believe when one met the pastor, a white-haired old man, whose hopeful
eyes saw always the best in human nature, and whose unconscious
saintship inevitably drew out the best, so that the most unrighteous,
from shame or from sympathy, made efforts to be righteous in his
company.
In the gardens, which were reached at the end of this leisurely voyage,
ranunculi were in bloom—a flower not often to be met in quantity in
England, where it is not popular. Why, is not clear, certainly one
might have thought it old-fashioned enough to have returned to favour
with straight-backed chairs and china dogs and cottage ornaments. The
more admired anemones were nearly over that day, only a few crimson and
purple flowers remained, so wide open that their black centres were all
revealed. They still stood stiff and straight on their stalks, not
bending to every breeze, like the ranunculi, which were a mass of
dancing rosettes, scarlet for the most part, though at the far corner
of the field there was a narrow strip of ivory-white ones, a beautiful
colour contrast.
We were still looking at the flowers when the pastor found us, and
carried us home to the Pastorie to tea. Tea in handleless cups, brought
from China, long before the ports were open to any but the sturdy old
Dutch traders, and handed down from mother to daughter without written
bequest, but inalienable as an English coronet. The maid-servant, I
remember, brought in her cup, not a little handleless one, but a good
substantial young basin, and her mistress filled it from the pot when
we had all been served. She was a rosy-cheeked bare-armed maid, close
relation, one might think, to Miss Matty’s invaluable Martha, or, in
appearance, to Peggotty of greater fame. Like Martha in her taste for
the lads, so her mistress said—a perhaps excusable fault, seeing that
many of the water-going profession—a class notoriously adept at
love-making—were always coming and going to the otherwise quiet little
village. Like Martha, too, she was in her unabashed interest in
strangers. It was the most wide-eyed attention she bestowed on me, and
with the most obvious reluctance that she left the room, with me in it,
when she had got her tea.
[Illustration: AZALEAS, HET LOO]
It was rather a dark little room, though it had two windows; one,
decorously veiled by hand-netted curtains, looking on to the cheeriness
of the village street; and one on to the small garden, where samples of
all the choice bulbs from the great grower in Haarlem were set, and
usually failed to bloom, for the pastor, unlike his brother, was a poor
gardener. On the other side of the passage was another room, the
pastor’s study it may have been called. There were no deep-seated
leather chairs there—the chairs were mostly wood, and not inviting to
repose; nor any richly sombre rows of leather-bound books, there were
only three books, a Bible and two others, and they were shabbily bound.
Rather a bare room, the white scrubbed floor quite carpetless, except
for a very small island of mat, which modestly hid itself under the
table. The folk who came to see the pastor on questions of mutual
dispute or individual difficulty, or any other of the hundred troubles
of common humanity, would seem to have been many. They were the sort
that wear wooden shoes, hard on carpets and great carriers of dirt, the
wife said, and she, no doubt, thought they would be happier if they had
not to keep such things in mind—as her husband certainly was. He was
most at home, good man, dispensing the wisdom of comfort in his
carpetless room, with his Bible and tobacco lying together on the deal
table, and the smoke of his pipe and his guests’ curling to the sunny
yellow-washed walls. The big window of this room looked out on to the
quay, and from it the pastor could nod greeting to half his
parishioners of a morning, and see, if he knew how to look, a good deal
of their doings. Even while we stood there that day, one of us very
conscious of the quiet brightness, the simple saintliness of the place,
the captain of our lately left boat came up on the deck of his little
vessel. He came to greet a girl—the fourth he had kissed, with the
well-received amorousness of at least betrothed rights, in my short
acquaintance with him. But the pastor did not know that, it was not the
sort of thing he knew. He knew how the captain had carried Johan
Vorst’s bulbs to Haarlem free that year, when the poor fellow lost so
much in the floods; how he brought the widow’s firing every winter, and
how he gave a job to Crooked Jan when he came back from prison, and no
one else (but the pastor) would give him a helping hand. These were the
things the pastor always knew—Blessings on the folk who always know the
best of us, and expect it, too!
But this is not concerning Dutch bulb fields, it has floated rather far
from the subject, like the little canal boat. Yet in a way it concerns
them, for to appreciate the flowers, and not only to see them as so
many streaks of colour or so many acres of blossoming roots, it is
perhaps well to know something of the life and ways of the people who
grow them—a people who have been the greatest gardeners, and some of
the greatest sea-carriers and collectors of the world for 400 years;
who, with much that is new, have kept a good deal that is old, and who
are perhaps less like what we are than what we used to be.
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