Yesterday (14th August) we were warned by meagre fare at the _table
d’hôte_ of our hotel that it was the vigil of some saint’s day. Our
gastronomic knowledge was enlarged by the opportunity of partaking
of boiled mussels. A small and delicate species of this little
fish--despised of Englishmen--is found in extraordinary quantities on
this coast. The sand is dotted with the shells after every ebb. The
wattles of the jetties are full of them. After the first shock of having
a salad bowl full of small black shells presented to one, following
immediately on a delicate _potage à l’oseille_, the British citizen may
pursue his education in this direction fearlessly, with the certainty of
becoming acquainted with a delicate and appetising morsel; and he will
return to his native country with at least a toleration for “winks” and
“pickled whelks,” when he sees them vended at corner stalls in Clare
Market or in the Old Kent Road, for the benefit of the dangerous classes
of his fellow-citizens who take their meals in the street. In these
Flemish parts they are eaten with bread and butter, and even as
whitebait, and by all classes.
After the meal I consulted the calendar in my pocket-book as to the
approaching festival, not wishing to thrust my heretical ignorance
unnecessarily on the notice of the simple folk who inhabit the _Lion
d’Or_. That obstinately Protestant document, however, informed me simply
that the Rev. E. Irving was born on this day in 1792, probably not the
saint I was in quest of. A _Churchman’s Almanac_, with which the only
English lady in the place was provided, was altogether silent as to
the day. In the end, therefore, I was obliged to fall back upon the
bright-eyed little _demoiselle de la maison_, who informed me that it
was the vigil of the Assumption of the Virgin, and that the _fête_ was
one greatly honoured by the community of Blankenberghe.
Thus prepared, I was not surprised at being roused at five in the
morning by the clumping of sabots and clinking of hammers in the street
below--my room is a corner one, looking from two windows on the Rue
d’Eglise, the principal street of the place, and from the other two
on the Rue des Pecheurs, or “Visschurs’ Straet,” which runs across the
northern end of the Rue d’Eglise. A flight of broad steps here runs up
on to the Digue, or broad terrace fronting the sea, and at the foot of
these steps they were erecting a temporary altar, and over it a large
picture of fishermen hauling in nets full of monsters of the deep. They
had brought it from the parish church, and, as such pictures go, it was
by no means a bad one. Presently tricoloured flags began to appear from
the windows of most of the houses in both streets, and here and there
garlands of bright-coloured paper were hung across from one side to the
other. As the morning advanced the bells from the church and convent
called the simple folk to mass at short intervals, six, half-past seven,
nine, and grand mass at ten. The call seemed to be answered by more
people than we had fancied the town could have held. At eleven there
was to be a procession, and now miniature altars with lighted candles
appeared in many of the ground-floor windows, both of shops and private
houses; and the streets were strewed with rushes and diamond-shaped
pieces of coloured paper. Punctual to its time the head of the
procession came round the corner of “Visschurs’ Straet,” half a dozen
small boys ringing bells leading the way. Then came the beadledom of
Blankenberghe, in the shape of several imposing persons in municipal
uniform, then three little girls dressed in white, with bouquets, more
boys, including a diligent but not very skilful drummer, six or seven
other maidens in white, somewhat older than their predecessors, of whom
the centre one carried some ornament of tinsel and flowers. Then
came the heavy silk canopy, supported by four light poles carried by
acolytes, and surrounded by choristers, of whom the leader bore a
large silver censer, and under the canopy marched a shaven monk in
cream-coloured brocade satin, carrying the pyx, and a less gorgeously
attired brother with an open missal. Around the whole of the procession,
to protect it from the accompanying crowd, were a belt of bronzed
fishermen in their best clothes, some carrying staves, some hymn-books,
and almost all joining in the chant which was rolled out by the priest,
in a powerful bass with a kind of metallic ring in it, as they neared
the altar at the foot of the steps. Here the whole procession paused,
and the greater part knelt, while the priest put incense in the censer,
and made his obeisances and prayed in an unknown tongue, and the censer
boy swung his sweet-smelling smoke about, and the fishermen and their
wives and children prayed too, in their own tongue, I suppose, and their
own way, probably for fair weather and plenty of fish, and let us hope
for brave and gentle hearts to meet whatever rough weather and short
commons may be in store for them by land or water, Then the procession
rose, and passed down the Rue d’Eglise, pausing at the corner of the
little market-place opposite a rude figure of the Madonna in a niche
over some pious doorway,
[Greek phrase]
and so out of sight. And the _bourgeois_ blew out the candles and took
away the chairs on which, while the halt lasted, they had been kneeling
from their shop windows, putting back the bathing dresses, and the shell
boxes, and other sea-side merchandise, while the whole non-shopkeeping
population, and the neighbours from Bruges, and the strangers who fill
the hotels and lodging-houses turned out upon the splendid sands and
on the Digue to enjoy their _fête_-day. In the afternoon the _corps de
musique_ of the communal schools of Bruges gave a gratuitous concert to
us all by the permission of the communal administration of that town,
as we bathed, or promenaded, or sipped coffee or liqueurs in the
broad verandahs of the _cafés_ which line the Digue. Gaily dressed
middle-class women (of upper classes, as we understand them, I see
none), in many-coloured garments and immense structures of false back
hair, such as these eyes have never before seen; a sprinkling of
Belgian officers in uniform, Russians, Frenchmen, Germans a few, and two
Anglo-Saxons, Englishmen I cannot say, for one is an American citizen
and the other your contributor, who compose the only English-speaking
males, so far as I can judge; groups of Flemish women of the people in
long black cloth cloaks, with large hoods lined with black satin, more
expensive probably, but not nearly so picturesque as the old red cloak
which thirty years ago was the almost universal Sunday dress of women in
Wiltshire, Berkshire, and other Western counties; little old-fashioned
girls in nice mob caps, and the fishermen in excellent blue broad-cloth
jackets and trousers, and well-blacked shoes or boots, instead of the
huge sabots of their daily life; in short, every soul, I suppose, in
Blankenberghe, from the Bourgmestre who sits on his throne, to the
donkey-boy who drives along his Neddy under a freight of children, at
half a franc an hour, whenever he can entice the small fry from the
superior attraction of engineering with the splendid sand, spends his
or her three or four hours on the Digue, enjoying whatever of the music,
gossip, coffee, beer, or other pastimes they are inclined to or can
afford; and in that whole crowd of pleasant holiday-making folk there is
not one single trace of poverty, not a starved face, not a naked foot,
not a ragged garment. It is the same on the week-days. The people,
notably the fishermen and _baigneurs_, dress roughly, but they have all
comfortable thick worsted stockings in their sabots, and their jerseys
and overalls are ample and satisfactory. Why is it that in nine places
out of ten on the Continent this is so, and that in England you shall
never be able to find a watering-place which is not deformed more or
less by poverty and thriftlessness? Right across the sea, there, on the
Norfolk coast, lie Cromer and Sherringham. More daring sailors never
manned lifeboat, more patient fishermen never dragged net, than the
seafaring folk of those charming villages. They are courteous, simple,
outspoken folk, too, singularly attractive in their looks and ways.
But, alas! for the rags, and the grinding poverty, declaring itself in
a dozen ways, in the cottages, in the children’s looks, in the women’s
premature old age. When will England wake up, and get rid of the curse
of her wealth and the curse of her poverty? When will an Englishman
be able again to look on at a fête-day in Belgium, or Switzerland,
or Germany, or France, without a troubled conscience and a pain in his
heart, as he thinks of the contrast at home, and the bitter satire in
the old, worn-out name of “Merry England?” It is high time that we
all were heartsick over it, for the canker grows on us. Those who know
London best will tell you so; those who know the great provincial towns
and country villages will tell you so, except perhaps that the latter
are now getting depopulated, and so contain less altogether of joy or
sorrow. However, sir, there are other than these holiday times in which
to dwell on this dark subject. I ought to apologise for having fallen
into it unawares, when I sat down merely to put on paper, if I could in
a few lines, and impart to your readers the exceeding freshness of the
feeling which the feast-day at this little Belgian watering-place leaves
on one. But who knows when he sits down, at any rate in the holidays,
what he is going to write? However good your intentions, at times you
can’t “get the hang of it,” can’t say the thing you meant to say.
You may wonder, too, at this sudden plunge into the _fête_ of the
Assumption at Blankenberghe, when I have never warned you even that I
had flitted from my round on the great crank which grinds for us all so
ruthlessly in the parts about the Strand and the Inns of Court. Well,
sir, I plead in my defence the test that a very able friend of mine
applies to novels. He opens the second volume and reads a chapter; if
that tempts him, on he goes to the end of the book; if it is very good
indeed, he then goes back, and fairly begins at the beginning. So I hope
your readers will be inclined to peruse in future weeks some further
gossip respecting this place, which should perhaps have preceded
the _fête_-day. If they should get to take the least interest in
Blankenberghians and their works and ways, it is more than these latter
can be said to do about them, for in the two or three cheap sheets which
I find on the table here, and which constitute the press of this corner
of Belgium, there is seldom more than a couple of lines devoted to the
whole British Empire. The fact that there is not another Englishman
in the place, and that the American above mentioned, the only other
representative of our English-speaking stock here, went once to see the
Derby, and got so bored by two o’clock that he left the Downs and walked
back to Epsom station, enduring the whole chaff of the road, and finding
the doors locked and the clerks and porters all gone up to the race,
ought to be enough to make them curious--curious enough at any rate
for long-vacation purposes. There are plenty of odds and ends of life
a little out of our ordinary track lying about here to make a small
“harvest for a quiet eye,” which I am inclined to try and garner for
you, if you think well. And are not the new King and Queen coming next
week to delight their subjects, and witness many kinds of fireworks,
and a “_concours des joueurs de boule, dits pas baenbolders_,” whatever
these may be?