I DID not go yachting in Holland in order to visit museums;
nevertheless, I saw a few. When it is possible to step off a yacht clean
into a museum, and heavy rain is falling, the temptation to remain on
board is not sufficiently powerful to keep you out of the museum. At
Dordrecht there is a municipal museum manned by four officials.
They received us with hope, with enthusiasm, with the most touching
gratitude. Their interest in us was pathetic. They were all dying of
ennui in those large rooms, where the infection hung in clouds almost
visible, and we were a specific stimulant. They seized on us as the
morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of the drug.
[Illustration: 0106]
Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of
Ary Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not
of heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer
is one of its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to
be another.) And posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The
Dordrecht museum is waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that
comes, the museum will be burned down, or turned into a brewery, and
the officials will be delivered from their dreadful daily martyrdom of
feigning ecstatic admiration for Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it
possible to comprehend the full baseness, the exquisite unimportance,
of Scheffer’s talent. The best thing of his in a museum full of him is
a free, brilliant copy of a head by Rembrandt done at the age of eleven.
It was, I imagine, his last tolerable work. His worst pictures, solemnly
hung here, would be justifiably laughed at in a girls’ schoolroom. But
his sentimentality, conventionality, and ugliness arouse less laughter
than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures have come into the Dordrecht
museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and Bosboom are refreshing,
but even their strong influence cannot disinfect the place nor keep
the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of time, and saw no
other visitors.
Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and
esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop,
buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a
high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and
here I got it. The establishment might have survived from the age
when Dordrecht was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so
survived. It was full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use.
It had an architectural air, and was aware of its own dignity. The
head-salesman managed to convey to me that the best tea--that was,
tea that a connoisseur would call _tea_--cost two and a half florins a
pound. I conveyed to him that I would take two pounds of the same. The
head-salesman then displayed to me the tea in its japanned receptacle.
He next stood upright and expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely
white apron, silently appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of
the shop, and with solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for
his superior to pour tea into. Having performed his share in the rite,
he disappeared. The parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process
being evidently a matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden
note. Whereon the merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter
from his office, and offered the change with punctilio. He would have
been perfect, but for a hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I
regretted this hole. We left the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit
that Dordrecht had atoned to us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have
made an excellent tea-dealer.
The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art
which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum
which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only
one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was
a cause of joy--that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the
most wonderful thing in the tourist’s Holland is the fact that the small
museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You
enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a
bell, and the _locus_ is antipathetic; but one’s pulse is immediately
quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And
Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre
paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally
the guide-books say naught.
The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up
with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant,
who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired
the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum
of the kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by
Rembrandt, of which he managed to exaggerate the value.
Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces
than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one’s first sight of Rembrandt’s
“Lesson in Anatomy” therein would constitute a dramatic event in any
yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy
one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday
of the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared
coarsely around, and understood nothing--nothing. True, they gazed in a
hypnotized semicircle at “The Lesson in Anatomy,” and I can hear amiable
persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant
and the simple. I don’t believe it. I believe that if “The Lesson
in Anatomy” had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of
Carolus-Duran, the ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized
just the same. And I have known the ignorant and the simple to be
overwhelmed with emotion by spurious trickery of the most absurd and
offensive kind.
An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic
experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic
sense the majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be
artistically civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can
make any appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy
of art, by which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in
the midst of a vast, dangerous population--a few adventurous whites
among indigenous hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may
have splendid qualities, but they have not that one quality which
more than any other vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the
manifestations of art which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not
very agreeable either. A string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth,
came into the Mauritshuis out of the rain, and mildly and politely
scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable. They were not intimidated.
Well, I like that. I preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten
thousand tourists.
Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag
was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste,
as illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact
that many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two
superb works--a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau--could not make up for
the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full
of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having
time to spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is
famous, and is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea,
but it does not rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a
sky full of kites. Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left
Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was profoundly established within me,
and in that there is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it
becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.
[Illustration: 0112]
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; but he did obtain part of a job now and then, subject to it
being “improved” by some duffer like Bernini, who of course contrived to
leave a large fortune, whereas if Michelangelo had lived to-day he might
never have got any job at all.
Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the
Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, “The Night-Watch”
of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on
the part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you:
“Hats off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.”
The truth is that “The Night-Watch” is neither very lovable nor very
beautiful. It is an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering
centuries in the eye, and it does so. But how long it will continue to
do so is a nice question.
Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of
room, despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me
with youth. It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful
mistakes, but at any rate it is being made under the guidance of
somebody who is not afraid of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced
with such a collection, one realizes the shortcomings of London museums
and the horror of that steely English official conservatism, at once
timid and ruthless, which will never permit itself to discover a foreign
artist until the rest of the world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks
there are Van Goghs and Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best,
but they are there. Also there are some of the most superb water-colors
of the age, and good things by a dozen classic moderns who are still
totally unrepresented in London. I looked at a celestial picture of
women--the kind of thing that Guys would have done if he could--painted
perhaps fifty years ago, and as modern as the latest Sargent
water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T. C.? T. C.? Who on earth could
T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas Couture, of course! A great
artist! He will appear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about
the middle of the twenty-first century.
Then there was Daumier’s “Christ and His Disciples,” a picture that I
would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might
seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take
the subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to
make you think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did
this. It is true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has
seen it and understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of
the exalted, mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive
disciples in the gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the
yacht and its ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that
art still lives. And I thought of Wilson Steer’s “The Music-Room” in
the Tate Gallery, London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in
London also art still lives.
[Illustration: 0117]
PART II--THE BALTIC
CHAPTER VII--THE YACHT I LOST
OUR adventures toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I
put into the planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a
month of time at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts
thinks nothing of a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere
preliminaries. Hence, with admirable forethought, I determined to send
the yacht on in advance. The _Velsa_ was to cross from her home port,
Brightlingsea, to the Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands,
to creep along the coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark,
past the mouths of the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg,
where we were to join her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then
to mount still farther the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by
a route combining fjords and canals, cross the top of the Jutland
peninsula, and enter the desired Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal
way would have been through the Kiel Canal. Yachts never take the Liim
Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason for taking the Liim Fjord.
Moreover, English yachts have a habit of getting into trouble with
the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English yachtsmen are apt to
languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I was uncertain
about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and I did not
wish to acquire certitude.
So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large
allowance of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful
new 30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him
except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind
never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never
blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before
the yacht’s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a
week the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from
Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind
held in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship
had reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my
Dutch skipper’s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east
wind still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by
cable. Then he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the
mail-steamer at Harwich for Esbjerg.
[Illustration: 0123]
She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her
very first trip. 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.
When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. 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. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What
the mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have
done in more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the
distance was simply nothing.
I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes,
though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on
the quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound
to be on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great
ship, because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have
accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The _Velsa_ was
definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of
the Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled
us out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of
purgatory. He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he
consented to be our friend, no serious harm could happen to our
universe. And the hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the
cigars were excellent. And the three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting
demurely about the long corridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad
in prints, foreign, separated romantically from us by the palisades of
language--the three modest chambermaids were all young and beautiful,
with astounding complexions.
The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than
east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless,
I more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the
extreme end of the jetty--about a mile each way each time--in the hope
of descrying the _Velsa’s_ long, red streamer in the offing. It was
Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly
modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though
extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of
the same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger,
especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful
or even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong,
gusty breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.
We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we
not gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the
standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other
place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday
summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a
degree really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at
all they wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been
a southern zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but
we retained them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound
compensations. There were two types of beautiful women, one with
straight lips, and the other with the upper lip like the traditional
bow. The latter, of course, was the more generously formed, acquiescent
and yet pouting, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had the effect
of making the foreigner feel that to be a foreigner and a stranger in
Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all the daily frequentations and intimacies
of the social organism, was a mistake.
[Illustration: 0130]
In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the
peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed
throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of
creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as
we stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as
it seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic
watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic,
whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a
heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.
We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed
about ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly
thatched, and each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures.
These farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change,
probably for the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about
thirty or forty years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in
two-horse vehicles, and though certain old men strolled to and fro,
smoking magnificent pipes at least a foot and a half long, the weight
of which had to be supported with the hand, there was little evidence of
opulence or even of ease.
The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and
other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even
leap across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously,
showed much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every
farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to
attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these
torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which
somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. 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. But the yacht had not come.
Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It
is true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never
been heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed
us, fed us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us.
We called him “Ober,” a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few
years, and his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself
in four languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all
our requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, “Oh, yes!
oh, yes!” He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one
ancient town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was
a young girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold
post-cards with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a
dealer. He sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows
straight from Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by
fragile women who saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a
canopy of flags that stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He
provided us with water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that
we could descend to the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered
from the wind by a pile of fish-boxes and from the showers by an
umbrella, produce wet water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in
motion.
Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was
lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or,
rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober
continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry.
And then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island
of Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible
island! What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew
it not. Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We
found it at last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And
I had been walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the
_Velsa’s wein!_
[Illustration: 0136]
The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the
Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The
Ober said:
“Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.”
“Yes; but the German customs?”
“Everything shall be arranged,” said the Ober.
I said:
“I don’t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.”
The Ober said calmly:
“I will go with you.”
“All the way?”
“I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak
German very well. Nothing will go wrong.”
Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put
on his best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly
through the German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first
meal at a small German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed
and accepted. When the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a
good meal. He took us through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes
of Schleswig-Holstein. He escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured
rooms for us at the hotel. Then he said he must return. No! no! We could
not let him abandon us in the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious
provincial town. But he murmured that he must depart. The yacht might
not arrive for days yet. I shuddered.
“At any rate,” I said, “before you leave, inquire where the haven is,
and take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.”
He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in
it. Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style
of the _Velsa_.
“There,” I said, “my yacht has a mast rather like that.”
I looked again. Utterly impossible that the _Velsa_ could have arrived
so quickly; but it was the _Velsa_. Joy! Almost tears of joy! I led the
Ober on board. He said solemnly:
“It is very beautiful.”
So it was.
But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.
The Ober said:
“I will arrange everything.”
In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel
hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall
I look on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a
featureless stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to
its junction with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers.
But no matter the dullness; we were afloat and in motion.
We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from
it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had
several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland’s
bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for
having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said
custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the
regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the
canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the
skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were
confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor
would call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our
papers, and let us go, thus supporting the skipper’s hotly held theory
that by the law of nations yachts on rivers are free.
We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice,
companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the
canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. “Only they don’t,”
he added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly
indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and
ever, and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He
said that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the
same ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!
We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy
rain and the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the
comparative freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which
looked attractive on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us;
it made us feel like spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little
pleasure town. Even here we had not walked a mile on land before we
were involved in forts and menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The
whole fjord was covered with battle-ships, destroyers, submarines,
Hydro-aëroplanes curved in the atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off
the waves. The air was noisy with the whizzing of varied screws. It was
enormous, terrific, intimidating, especially when at dusk
search-lights began to dart among the lights of the innumerable
fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply involved in
the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew proudly,
unchallenged.
[Illustration: 0141]
The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men
here and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls
left us utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content
to sit vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain,
discharging into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense.
These quiet, tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw
slavish material of the magnificent imperial system, and entirely
unconnected with the wondrous brains that organized it and kept it
going. The next morning we departed very early, but huge targets were
being towed out in advance of us, and we effected our final escape into
the free Baltic only by braving a fleet of battleships that fired into
the checkered sky. Sometimes their shells glinted high up in the sun,
and seemed to be curving along the top edge of an imaginary rainbow.
We slowly left them astern, with, as I say, a certain relief. Little,
unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.
CHAPTER VIII--BALTIC COMMUNITIES
AT Vordingborg, a small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the
largest and easternmost of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to
be really for the first time in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had
a certain international quality). We had sailed through the Langelands
Belt, skirting the monotonous agricultural coasts of all sorts of
islands, great and small, until one evening we reached this city, which
looked imposing on the map. When we had followed the skipper ashore on
his marketing expedition, and trodden all the stony streets of little
Vordingborg, we seemed to know what essential Denmark, dozing in the
midst of the Baltic, truly was.
Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis
to this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of
tradition. It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises
were placidly shopping therein--the same little bourgeoises that one
sees all over the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists;
a bookseller who also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl
actuating an efficient sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an
electric fan whirring close to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a
vague open space, a few carts, with their shafts on the ground; a few
stalls; a few women; a butcher whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses
on a stand; baskets of fruit and vegetables on the Danish ground; our
skipper chattering by signs and monosyllables in the middle. That was
Vordingborg.
[Illustration: 0146]
In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more
architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though
it was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last
service were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and
screen were ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth
at a fair. Three women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the
interior. Their cloaks and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor.
They never even glanced at us. We left the church, and then skirting
market-gardens and climbing over the ramparts of the fort, we descended
to the mournful little railway station, and as we watched a little train
amble plaintively in and out of that terminus, we thought of the numbers
of the hymns sung at the last service in the church, and the immense
devastating ennui of provincial existence in remote places enveloped us
like a dank fog. We set sail, and quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we
might harden our hearts and be unjust to Vordingborg, which, after all,
at bottom, must be very like a million other townlets on earth.
Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis
and a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the
Stege Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter
in a village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing--nothing but
a thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked
railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the
railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo,
and it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at
anchor in the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving
us alone in Faxo.
At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy
fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not
even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was
a telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning
motionless on her father’s, or her grandfather’s, tarpaulin shoulder.
Full of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled
from Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole
of a bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the
capital of the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.
[Illustration: 0151]
And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the _Velsa_ had
less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in
such ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain
a “story” about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was
almost equal to being anchored off the Battery, New York.
At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows
of the booksellers’ shops were photographs of the director of the
municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly
resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself
was among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a
strange, comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the
streets of Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of
its taxicabs was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the
Royal, with first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter
garden, where the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and
succeeded in amusing themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a
politeness that could not possibly be achieved in any provincial town in
England, were it five times the size of Aarhus. And why?
Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance.
Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a
civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg
stood unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered
together in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had
had the sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of
fashion, but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They
were neither one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness,
efficiency, constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not
capture the stranger’s interest.
There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than
Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its
close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and
by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the
town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station
and the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale
costumes, and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a
foreign country two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of
Helsingôr have an architectural interest, and its fruit shops display
exotic fruits at high prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles.
Generals get out of a closed cab at the railway station, and they bear
a furled standard, and vanish importantly with it into the arcana of the
station. The newspapers of many countries are for sale at the kiosk. The
harbor-master is a great man, and a suave.
The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town
and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often
well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic
proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of
course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts,
we saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in
fatigue uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the
table another private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand,
doing nothing whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed
bareness of the chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the
monstrous melancholy of barrack-life, the same throughout the world.
Part of the castle is set aside as a museum, wherein, under the
direction of a guide, one is permitted to see a collection of pictures
the surpassing ugliness of which nearly renders them interesting. The
guide points through a window in the wall ten feet thick to a little
plot of turf. “Where Hamlet walked.” No historical authority is offered
to the visitor for this statement. The guide then leads one through a
series of large rooms, empty save for an occasional arm-chair, to the
true heart of the Kronborg, where he displayed to us a seated statue
of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme unpleasant bluish-white. An
inscription told that it had been presented to Kronborg by a committee
of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some anniversary. The guide
said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not believe him.
[Illustration: 0157]
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 half-dozen men on her,
cut off from the world, are closely knitted into a new companionship,
the sense of which is expressed not in words, but by the subtleties
of tone and mien; and if only one amoung them falls short of absolute
loyalty and good-will toward the rest, the republic is a failure, and
the air of ocean poisoned. The dictum of an older and far more practised
yachtsman than myself used always to be, “I ’ll have no man aboard my
ship who can’t smile all the time.” It is a good saying. And it could
be applied to my yacht in the Baltic. We had days at sea in the Baltic
which were ideal and thrilling from one end to the other.
[Illustration: 0161]
To make a final study of the chart in the cabin while waiting for
breakfast is a thrilling act. You choose a name on the chart, and
decide: “We will go to that name.” It is a name. It is not yet a town
or a village. It is just what you imagine it to be until you first sight
it, when it instantly falsifies every fancy. The course is settled. The
ship is on that course. The landmarks will suffice for an hour or two,
but the sea-marks must be deciphered on the chart, which is an English
chart, and hence inferior in fullness and clearness to either French
or Dutch charts. Strange, this, for a nation preëminently maritime! To
compensate, the English “Sailing Directions”--for example, the “Pilot’s
Guide to the Baltic”--are so admirably written that it is a pleasure
to read them. Lucid, succinct, elegant, they might serve as models to a
novelist. And they are anonymous.
To pick up the first buoy is thrilling. We are all equally ignorant of
these waters; the skipper himself has not previously sailed them, and
we are all, save the cook, engulfed below amid swaying saucepans, on the
lookout for that buoy. It ought to be visible at a certain hour, but it
is not. The skipper points with his hand and says the buoy must be about
there, but it is not. He looks through my glasses, and I look through
his; no result. Then the deck-hand, without glasses, cries grinning
that he has located her. After a quarter of an hour I can see the thing
myself. That a buoy? It is naught but a pole with a slightly swollen
head. Absurd to call it a buoy! Nevertheless, we are relieved, and in
a superior manner we reconcile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy
of employing broom-handles for buoys. The reason for this dangerous
idiosyncrasy neither the skipper nor anybody else could divine.
Presently we have the broom close abeam, a bobbing stick all alone in
the immense wilderness of water. There it is on the chart, and there it
is in the water, a romantic miracle. We assuage its solitude for a few
minutes, and then abandon it to loneliness.
We resume the study of the chart; for although we are quite sure of our
course, the skipper can never be sure enough. My attention is drawn to
a foot-note that explains the ice-signals of the Baltic. And the skipper
sets to telling tales of terror about the ice, in the Zuyder Zee and
other seas. He tells how the ice forms under the ship surreptitiously,
coming up from the bottom like treacle. You say, “It’s freezing
to-night,” and the next morning the ship can’t move; and you may die of
starvation, for though the ice will hold the ship, it won’t hold you.
The skipper knew men who could remember ice in the Zuyder Zee in June.
He himself had once oscillated for a whole week between two ports on the
Zuyder Zee, visible to each other, pushed hither and thither by the ice,
and unable to get anywhere at all. But ice was less terrible than
it used to he, owing to the increased strength and efficiency of
ice-breakers. And climate was less rigorous. Thus the skipper would
reassure us for a moment, only to intimidate us afresh. For it seems
that the ice has a way of climbing; it will climb up over everything,
and inclose a ship. Indeed, he was most impressive on the subject of
ice. He said that the twin horrors of the sea were ice and fog. But
of fog he told no tales, being occupied with the forward valve of the
engine. We perceived that yachtsmen who go out when it happens to suit
them, between May and September only, can never achieve intimacy with
the entire individuality of the sea.
The weather has now cleared for a while. 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.
On the flat shores of near islands the same cereals ripen as ripen at
home. And this is thrilling. Distant islands are miraged. Even a distant
battleship seems to be lifted clean out of the water by the so-called
mirage.
And then a trading-schooner, small, but much larger than us,
relentlessly overhauls us. She laughs at the efforts of our engine to
aid our sails, and forges ahead, all slanting, with her dinghy slung up
tight aft, over her rudder. And then it is the still small voice of the
stomach that speaks. Hunger and repletion follow each other very swiftly
on such days. The after-breakfast cigar is scarcely finished before
a genuine curiosity as to the menu of lunch comes to birth within. We
glance into the saloon. Yes, the white cloth is laid, but we cannot eat
cloth. The cook and the chronometer are conspiring together against us.
In the afternoon the weather is thick and squally. And we are creeping
between sad and forlorn veiled islands that seem to exude all the
melancholy of the seas. There is plenty of water, but only in a
deceiving horizontal sense. The channel is almost as narrow and
as tortuous as a Devonshire lane. English charts are criminally
preposterous, and so are Danish brooms. Hardly can one distinguish
between a starboard and a port broom. Is the life of a yacht to depend
on such negligent devices? The skipper is worried. And the spectacle
of a ship aground in mid-sea does not tranquilize. Sometimes the hail
wipes out for a few seconds the whole prospect. The eyes of everybody
are strained with looking for distant brooms.
[Illustration: 0168]
Then we are free of the archipelago, and also the sky clears. The sun,
turning orange, is behind us, and the wind in our teeth. Ahead is a
schooner, beating. And she is the schooner of the morning. Our engine
now has the better of her. As we overtake her, she runs away on one
tack, and comes back on the next. She bears down on our stern, huge,
black, glittering. A man and a boy are all her crew. This man and this
boy are entitled to be called mariners, as distinguished from yachtsmen.
We can see their faces plainly as they gaze down at us from their high
deck. And you may see just the same faces on the liners that carry
emigrants from Denmark to the West, and the same limbs sprawling on
the decks of the Esbjerg steamers, as the same hands scrawl Danish
characters on picture postal cards to the inhabitants of these very
islands.
The sea is now purple, and the schooner a little black blot on the red
panorama of the sunset; and ahead, amid faint yellow and green fields,
is a white speck, together with sundry red specks and blue specks. 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. The skipper shakes his head, at a loss, and gives an order
to the deck-hand. The deck-hand claws with a pole at a yellow smack.
We have ceased to be independent. The name on the chart is a name no
longer. It is a living burg, a poor little place, good enough to sleep
in, and no more. But another stage on the journey to that magic capital
Copenhagen.
PART III COPENHAGEN
CHAPTER X--THE DANISH CAPITAL
ACROSS the great expanse of Kjoge Bay, Copenhagen first became visible
as a group of factory chimneys under a firmament of smoke. We approached
it rapidly upon smooth water, and ran into the narrowing bottle-neck of
Kallebo, with the main island of Sjælland to the west and the appendant
island of Amager to the east. Copenhagen stands on both, straddling over
a wide connecting bridge which carries double lines of electric trams
and all the traffic of a metropolis. When a yacht, even a small one,
wishes to enter the harbor, this bridge is cut in two and lifted into
the air, and the traffic impatiently champs its bit while waiting for
the yacht.
[Illustration: 0174]
Apparently they understand yachts at Copenhagen, as they do in Holland.
At the outer harrier of the harbor we were not even requested to stop.
A cheerful and beneficent functionary cried out for our name, our
captain’s name, our tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his
curiosity being sated, waved us onward. The great bridge bisected itself
for us with singular promptitude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man
in charge thereof from his high perch signaled to us that our burgee was
too small. We therefore, having nothing else handy to placate him,
ran up a blue ensign to the masthead; but it looked so excessively odd
there, so acutely contrary to the English etiquette of yachts, that we
at once hauled it down again. No further complaint was made.
We were now in the haven, and over the funnels of many ships we could
see the city. It was all copper domes and roofs; and we saw that it was
a proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns to a beautiful green
instead of to black, as in London. Splendid copper domes are the chief
symptom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous, tiny provincialism
of the peninsula and of the islands, it was sensational to find a vast
capital at the far end of the farthest island. We thought we were coming
to the end of the world, and we came to a complete and dazzling city
that surpassed, for example, Brussels in its imposingness. We turned
westward out of the main channel into the heart of the town, and in a
moment were tied up to a smack, and the red-and-green bourse was
leaning over us; the rattle and ringing and stamping of horses, lorries,
tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deafened us on three sides; and a bridge
trembling with traffic barred our way.
Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge; crowds stood to gaze at us;
steamers and warehouses filled the prospect to the north; and under our
bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copenhagen, each holding a dozen
passengers or so, continually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific
din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we had arrived in a grand
town; we knew that at the first glance.
[Illustration: 0179]
In something less than half an hour one of us had gone forth and
returned with grave tidings: “This is a most exciting city. I’ve already
seen lots of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-colored hair.” The
charm of distant Esbjerg was at last renewed. I went forth myself, into
a very clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively inhabitants. In
a trice I had gazed at the Thorvaldsen Museum (which I had no intention
of entering, Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same artistic plane
as the inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dordrecht), the Christianborg Palace,
which had an austere and kingly air, the very modern and admirable
town hall, the old railway station, which has been transformed into
the largest kinema in the world, the floating fish shops and fish
restaurants (made out of old smacks and schooners), the narrow,
thronged shopping streets, the celebrated Tivoli establishment, and the
yacht-like steamers that from a quay, which might almost be called the
gate to Sweden, in the very middle of the town, are constantly setting
sail for Scandinavia. From Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly
as in New York you go from Forty-second to Sixty-ninth Street, or
in London from the Bank to Chelsea, and with less discipline. If the
steamer has cast off, and the captain sees you hurrying up the street,
he stops his engines and waits for you, and you are dragged on board by
a sailer; whereupon the liner departs, unless the captain happens to see
somebody else hurrying up the street.
An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my
feet that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped
back to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no
more of the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak
a single word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an
equipage. What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak
either English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it
was overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was
drawn by two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by
a liveried being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the
probable cost of this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not
care. The ligure named was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the
carriage during our sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman
never complained. Possibly because he had no language in which to
complain. We learned in a moment that his ability to speak French
was entirely mythical. Then some one said that a misunderstanding had
occurred at the livery-stables, and that German was the foreign language
he spoke, But he did not speak German either, nor anything else. He was
just another of those strange creatures met in the course of travel who
are born, who mature, and who die without speaking or comprehending any
language whatever.
From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon
the rushing population of Copenhagen--beautiful women, with lovely
tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made
one mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to
go to a teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up
an interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands
upon thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on
and on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could
not stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German
had no effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed
in the distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We
saw an incomprehensible colony of doll’s houses--well-kept suburban huts
exteriorly resembling houses--in a doll’s garden. We could not conceive
the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden. Presently
the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no uniform,
but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of Hillerup, and
that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order to traverse
Hillerup.
It seemed a lot of money; but as it only amounted to sixpence, we paid.
The man may have been a highwayman. We looked at the map for Hillerup,
and found it miles away from Copenhagen.
We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless. The driver drove
on. He conducted us through half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite
unjustly celebrated “Danish Riviera”; he came actually to the end of
the tram-line, and then he curved inland into a forest (more to pay). We
were now angry and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the roads
in it no direction. Desperate, we signaled to him to turn back. He would
not. He informed us on his lingers that he would be arriving in twenty
minutes or so. When he did arrive, we solved the mystery. He had
confused the word for tea with the word for deer, and had brought us
to a well-known country resort called the Deer Park. 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.
CHAPTER XI--CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS
THE most interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large
foreign city that does not live on its own past is not the museums, but
the restaurants and cafés, even in the dead season. We were told that
August was the dead season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at
the seaside resorts. We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside
resorts, and they were without exception far more dead than Copenhagen.
In particular Marienlyst, reputed to be the haunt of fashion and
elegance, proved to be a very sad, deserted strand. Copenhagen was not
dead.
We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by
authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold
place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of
hors-d’ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but
it has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner
is over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people
were unceremoniously and expensively eating--in the main hors-d’ouvre.
The metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great
restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and
the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing
money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies
of waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on
Fifth Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the
wholesale, crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets
to persons in the swim.
Next we went to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, which was just the restaurant
of the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and
you might as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers,
Brussels, as at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the
same waiters, the same furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same
detestable, self-restrained English travelers, with their excruciating
Englishness. The café on the ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a
large and busy circular _place_, with the opera and other necessaries of
metropolitan life close by, was more amusing than the restaurant. It was
a genuine resort in the afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to
and fro in front of its canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an
English yachting party of astounding correctness and complacency (from
one of those conceited three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white,
and jeweled in many holes, like a watch), or to a couple of Danish
commercials, or to a dandy and his love. Here we one night singled out
for observation a very characteristic Danish young man and young woman
with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive voices, and the soothing
gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight; but when we had
carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered that they were
an English pair on their honeymoon.
[Illustration: 0186]
In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly
Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the
Wiener Café, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room,
anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the
somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at
a rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: “This is the most
select resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented
by the flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand
years. It has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can
enter here. Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the
niceties of our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.”
In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an
English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu
was in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air
of a saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the
_prix fixe_, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, “Will
you let me have a look at the cake, and then I ‘ll decide.” He replied
that he could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was
definitively ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this
attitude. Cake never had been shown on approval at the Wiener Café
of the Hotel King of Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head
before an august tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener Café ought
to open a branch in London; it was the most English affair I have ever
encountered out of England.
Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we
chose the restaurant of the Hotel--------for dinner. The room was darkly
gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to an empty
table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three inefficient
under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for fifteen
minutes; they had their habitués to serve. At the end of fifteen minutes
we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing any
apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely
omitted to tip.
[Illustration: 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 German _art 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.
[Illustration: 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.
CHAPTER XII--ARISTOCRACY AND ART
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.
[Illustration: 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 octagonal _place_) 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!
[Illustration: 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.
CHAPTER XIII--THE RETURN
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 the _Velsa_. 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.
[Illustration: 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.