yacht-basin scooped out of it, was a sort of toy seaside resort for
the city. Part of the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club
is housed was used as a public restaurant, with a fine terrace that
commanded the yacht-club landing-stage and all the traffic of the sound.
Moreover, it was a good restaurant, except that the waiters seemed to be
always eating some titbit on the sly.
Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure of the sound. The
czar’s yacht came to anchor, huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with
a blue-and-white standard large enough to make a suit of sails for a
schooner--the biggest yacht afloat, I think, but not a pleasing object,
though better than the antique ship of the Danish king. The unwieldy
ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed to surround this pompous
vessel, and the solitary tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest
in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futility of saluting guns! The two
English royal yachts, both of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in
every way strikingly superior to the Russian.
Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that restaurant terrace.
At night the steamers would slip down out of Copenhagen one after the
other to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving parterre of
electricity on the darkness. And then we would walk along the nocturnal
shore and find it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose bicycles
were often stacked in groups, too. And the little yachts in the little
yacht-basin were each an illuminated household! A woman would emerge
from a cabin and ask a question of a man on the dark bank, and he would
flash a lantern-light in her face like a missile, and “Oh!” she would
cry. And farther on the great hulk which is the home of the Copenhagen
Amateur Sailing Club would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from
within it would come the sounds of song and the laughter of two sexes.
And then we would yell, “_Velsa_, ahoy!” and keep on yelling until all
the lightly clad couples were drawn out of the chilly night like moths
by the strange English signaling. And at last the _Velsa_ would wake
up, and the dinghy would detach itself from her side, and we would go
aboard. But not until two o’clock or so would the hilarity and music of
the Amateur Sailing Club cease, and merge into a frantic whistling for
taxicabs from the stand beyond the restaurant.
Then a few hours’ slumber, broken by nightmares of the impossibility of
ever quitting Copenhagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness
of the dismantled engine, and over the water at the yachts dozing
and rocking in the dawn. And on a near yacht, out of the maw of a
forecastle-hatch left open for air, a half-dressed sailor would appear,
and yawn, and stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the
yacht’s deck.
[Illustration: 0221]
The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; and the
first of the morning steamers would arrive from some mystical distant
island, a vessel, like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons, red
and black funnels, the captain looking down at us from the bridge; a
nice handful of passengers, including a few young women in bright
hats; everything damp and fresh, and everybody expectant and braced
for Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary sight! And then our skipper would
emerge, and the cook with my morning apple on a white plate. And the
skipper would say, “We ought to be able to make a start to-day, sir.”
And on the third day we did make a start, the engine having been
miraculously recreated; and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.
PART IV--ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST
CHAPTER XIV--FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
WE waited for the weather a day and a night at Folkestone, which,
though one of the gateways of England, is a poor and primitive place to
lie in. Most of the time we were on the mud, and to get up into England
we had to climb a craggy precipice called the quay-wall. Nevertheless,
the harbor (so styled) is picturesque, and in the less respectable
part of the town, between the big hotels and band-stands and the
mail-steamers; there are agreeable second-hand book shops, in one of
which I bought an early edition of Gray’s poems bound in ancient vellum.
The newspapers were very pessimistic about the weather, and smacks
occasionally crept in for shelter, with wild reports of what was going
on in the channel. At four o’clock in the morning, however, we started,
adventurous, for the far coasts of Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel
was a gray and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale. And I
also was weary and uneasy, for it is impossible for a civilized person
of regular habits to arise at four a. m. without both physical and
psychical suffering, and the pleasure derived from the experience,
though real, is perverse. The last gleams of the Gris-Nez and the Varne
lights were visible across the heaving waste, feebly illuminating the
intense melancholy of the dawn. There was nothing to do except steer
and keep your eyes open, because a favorable and moderate southwest wind
rendered the engine unnecessary. The ship, and the dinghy after her,
pitched and rolled over the heavy swell. The skipper said naught. I said
naught. The lights expired. The dark gray of the sea turned to steel.
The breeze was icy. Vitality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed
exceedingly remote, even unattainable. Great, vital questions presented
themselves to the enfeebled mind, cutting at the very root of all
conduct and all ambitions. What was the use of yachting? What was the
use of anything? Why struggle? Why exist? The universe was too vast, and
the soul homeless therein.
And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray,
and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a
white cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and
potent draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances
of beauty! Only the finest China tea is employed aboard the _Velsa_.
I drank, and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was
transformed. We began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling
over, spurted. It was a grand life. We descried the French coast. The
hours flew. Before breakfast-time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between
the piers at Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine. At 8:15 we ran
her on the mud, on a rising tide, next to a pilot-boat, the _Jean et
Marie_, inhabited by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp to
the Quai Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and considered ourselves fairly
in France.
[Illustration: 0228]
The officials of the French republic on the quay had been driven by
the spectacle of our peculiar Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange,
emotional attitudes; and as soon as we were afloat, the French republic
came aboard in a dinghy manned by two acolytes. The skipper usually
receives the representatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper
speaks no French, and as this was the first time I had entered France
in this style, I thought I would be my own ambassador. I received the
French republic in my saloon; we were ravishingly polite to each other;
we murmured sweet compliments to each other. He gave me a clean bill of
health, and went off with four francs and one half-penny. There is no
nation like the French. A French milliner will make a hat out of a
piece of felt and nothing; and a French official will make a diplomatic
episode out of nothing at all, putting into five minutes of futility all
the Gallic civilization of centuries.
Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly
limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes
on is extraordinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence a flag
flies to warn the surrounding seas when the entrance is occupied or
about to be occupied. The state of the tide is also indicated, and the
expert can read from hieroglyphics slung in the air the exact depth of
water at a particular moment between the piers. In addition, of course,
there is the weather signaling. We had scarcely been in port a couple
of hours before the weather signaling shocked us; nay, we took it as
an affront to ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the
tail-end of one south gale, and now another was predicted! How could
small people like us hope to work our way down to Brittany in the teeth
of the gale! And I had an appointment in the harbor of Carantec, a tiny
village near Morlaix, in a week’s time! The thing was monstrous. But the
south cone was hoisted, and it remained hoisted. And the cone is
never displayed except for a real gale,--not a yachtsman’s gale, but a
sailor’s gale, which is serious.
A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American liner in the roads. We
followed her along the jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was
already blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the horizon. Soon we
were in the midst of a squall ourselves. The rain hid everything for a
minute. It cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet, with the
variegated bathing-tents, from which even then beautiful creatures were
bathing in a shallow surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex
roofs of Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top,
and the illimitable dunes that are a feature of this part of the
country. Above all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue. The
skipper did not like those thunder-clouds; he said they were the most
dangerous of all clouds, “because anything might come out of them.” He
spoke as if they already contained in their bosoms every conceivable
sort of weather, which they would let loose according to their caprice.
The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled us to hold tight to the
rail of the pier. A poster announced that in the casino behind the
rain, Suppé’s “Boccaccio” was to be performed that night, and Massenet’s
“Thaïs” the next night. And opera seemed a very artificial and
unnecessary form of activity as we stood out there in the reality of
the storm. The Atlantic liner had now bid good-by to the tender, and was
hugely moving. She found sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of
her bigness, and headed straight into the gale, pitching like a toy. The
rain soon veiled her, and she was gone. I could not picture the _Velsa_
in such a situation, at any rate with the owner on board. We went back,
rather pensive, to the Quai Chanzy.
[Illustration: 0234]
The men in the pilot-boat alongside the _Velsa_ were not in the least
reassuring as to the chances of the _Velsa_ ever getting to Brittany;
but they were uplifted because the weather was too rough for them to go
out. When the cone is on view, the pilot-service is accomplished by a
powerful steam-vessel. Our friends, in their apparently happy idleness,
sculled forth in a dinghy about fifty yards from where we lay, and
almost immediately rejoined us with three eels that they had caught.
I bought the three eels for two shillings, and the cook cooked them
perfectly, and I ate one of them with ecstasy a few hours later; but
eels are excessively antipathetic to the digestive organs, and may
jaundice the true bright color of the world for days.
The transaction of the eels, strengthened our intimacy with the pilot’s
crew, who imparted to us many secrets; as, for example, that they were
the selfsame men who act as porters at the quay for the transfer of
luggage when the cross-channel steamers arrive and depart. On one day
they are the pilot’s crew, and on the next they are porters to carry
your handbags through the customs. This was a blow to me, because on
the innumerable occasions when I had employed those porters I had always
regarded them as unfortunate beings who could earn money only during
about an hour each day, victims of the unjust social system, etc., and
who were therefore specially deserving of compassion and tips. I now
divined that their activities were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed
together like a Chinese puzzle, and all reasonably remunerative. The
which was very French and admirable. Herein was a valuable lesson to me,
and a clear saving in future of that precious commodity, compassion.
In a day or two the horrid fact emerged that we were imprisoned in
Boulogne. The south cone did not budge. Neither could we. The tide
ebbed; the tide flowed; we sank softly into the mud; we floated again.
A sailor cut our warp because it was in his way, and therefore incurred
our anger and the comminations of the harbor-master. But we were
not released. An aeroplane meeting was announced, and postponed. We
witnessed the preparations for the ceremonial opening of a grand new
dock. We went to the casino and listened to Russian music, which in
other circumstances would have enchanted us.
But none of these high matters could hold our attention. Even when the
cook criticized our water-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly
that he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought proofs of his genius cut
of the forecastle, even then we were not truly interested. We thirsted
to depart, and could not. Our sole solace was to walk round and round
the basini in the rain-squalls, and observe their tremendous vitality,
which, indeed, never ceased, day or night save at low water, when most
craft were aground.
At such periods of tranquillity the trucks of the fishing-smacks were
nearly level with the quay, and we noticed that every masthead was
elaborately finished with gilded sculpture--a cross, a star, or a small
figure of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or an angel. The names, too, of these
smacks were significant: _Resurrection, Jesus-Marie_, and so on. The
ornamentation of the deck-houses and companions of these vessels showed
a great deal of fantasy and brilliant color, though little taste. And
the general effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demonstrating, as it
did, that the boats were beloved. English fishing-boats are beloved by
their owners, but English affection does not disclose itself in the same
way, if it discloses itself at all. On the third afternoon we assisted
at the departure of an important boat for the herring fisheries. It had
a crew of seventeen men, all dressed in brown, young and old, and
an enormous quantity of gear. It bore the air of a noble cooperative
enterprise, and went off on the tide, disdainfully passing the
still-hoisted cone.
Perhaps it was this event that gave us to think. If a herring-boat could
face the gale, why not we? Our ship was very seaworthy, and the coast
was dotted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible to go south,
since we could not have made headway. Then why not boldly cancel the
rendezvous in Brittany, and run northward before the gale? The skipper
saluted the idea with enthusiasm. He spoke of Ostend. He said that if
the wind held we could easily run to Ostend in a day. He did not care
for Ostend, but it would be a change. I, however, did care for Ostend.
And so it was decided that, unless the wind went right round in the
night, we would clear out of Boulogne at the earliest tidal hour the
next morning. The joy of expectancy filled the ship, and I went into
the town to buy some of the beautiful meat-pies that are offered in its
shops.
[Illustration: 0239]
CHAPTER XV--TO BELGIUM
AT 6 a. M. we, too, were passing disdainfully the still-hoisted cone.
Rain descended in sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we
did not happen to be in the rain, we could see rain-squalls of the most
theatrical appearance in every quarter of the horizon. The gale had
somewhat moderated, but not the sea; the wind, behind us, was against
the tide, and considerably quarreling therewith. Now we were inclosed in
walls of water, and now we were balanced on the summit of a mountain of
water, and had a momentary view of many leagues of tempest. I
personally had never been out in such weather in anything smaller than a
mail-steamer.
Here I must deal with a distressing subject, which it would be
pleasanter to ignore, but which my training in realism will not allow
me to ignore. A certain shameful crime is often committed on yachts,
merchantmen, and even men-of-war. It is notorious that Nelson committed
this crime again and again, and that other admirals have copied his
iniquity. Sailors, and particularly amateur sailors, would sooner be
accused of any wickedness rather than this. Charge them with cheating at
cards, ruining innocent women, defrauding the Government, and they will
not blench; but charge them with this offense, and they will blush, they
will recriminate, and they will lie disgracefully against all evidence;
they cannot sit still under the mere suspicion of it.
As we slipped out of the harbor that morning the secret preoccupation
of the owner and his friend was that circumstances might tempt them to
perpetrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say that they withstood
the awful temptation; but only just! If out of bravado they had
attempted to eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would assuredly
have been committed, but they had the sense to order the meals to be
served in the cockpit, in the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter
the conditions! They were saved from turpitude, and they ate heartily
thrice during the day. And possibly nobody was more astonished than
themselves at their success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an
expert, a member of an exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course
shoreward in circumstances not devoid of danger.
“What are you about?” was the affrighted question. He replied:
“I’m going to beach her. If I don’t, I shall be sick, and I won’t be
sick aboard this yacht.”
Such is the astounding influence of convention, which has transformed
into a crime a misfortune over which the victim has no control whatever.
We did not beach the _Velsa_, nor were our appetites impaired. We were
lucky, and merely lucky; and yet we felt as proud as though we had,
by our own skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of. This is
human nature.
As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the most majestic natural
scenes I have ever witnessed, not a gale, but about half of a gale, was
blowing. The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the tide was slack,
and between Calais and Dunkirk we had it under our feet, and were able
to dispense with the engine and still do six and a half knots an hour.
Thenceforward the weather grew calm with extraordinary rapidity, while
the barometer continuously fell. At four o’clock the wind had entirely
expired, and we restarted the engine, and crawled past Westend and
Nieuport, resorts very ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from
the sea. By the time we sighted the whiteness of the kursaal at Ostend
the water was as flat as an Inland lake.
[Illustration: 0246]
The sea took on the most delicate purple tints, and the pallor of the
architecture of Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were yet a mile
and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies with stings wandered out from
the city to meet us.
We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at 6:10 p. m., and the skipper
was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering in the basin, he
leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:
“I ‘ve had a bit o’ luck this week.”
“With the engine?” I suggested, for the engine had been behaving itself
lately.
“No, sir. My wife presented me with a little boy last Tuesday. I had the
letter last night. I’ve been expecting it.” But he had said nothing to
me before. He blushed, adding, “I should like you to do me a very great
favor, sir--give me two days off soon, so that I can go to the baptism.”
Strange, somehow, that a man should have to ask a favor to be present
at the baptism of his own son! The skipper now has two sons. Both, I was
immediately given to understand, are destined for the sea. He has six
brothers-in-law, and they all follow the sea. On a voyage he will never
willingly leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will rush down
to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow it in two minutes and a half,
and rush back. I said to him once:
“I believe you must be fond of this wheel.”
“I am, sir,” he said, and grinned.
We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and our rudder was within
a foot of the street. Next to us lay the _Velsa’s_ sister (occasion for
the historic remark that “the world is very small”), a yacht well known
to the skipper, of exactly the same lines as the _Velsa_, nearly the
same size, and built within four miles of her in the same year! The
next morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were equally drenched in
tremendous downpours of rain, but made no complaint to each other. I
had the awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon
skylights open.
The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness of Ostend. Like
sundry other cities, Ostend has two individualities, two souls. All
that fronts the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is grandiose,
cosmopolitan, insincere, taciturn, blatant, and sterile. It calls
itself the finest sea-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is
as factitious as a meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is
Belgian, more than Belgian--Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident,
simple, unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are
full of little cafés that are full of little men and fat women. All the
little streets are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum
quantity of sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs
drawing little carts hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars
and the whistling of railway engines.
On this Sunday morning there was a band festival of some kind, upon
which the pitiless rain had no effect whatever. Band after band swung
past our rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some marketing to do, as
the cook declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish,
and we waited impatiently under umbrellas for the procession of bands
to finish. It would not finish, and we therefore had to join it. All the
way up the Rue de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves speak in the
brazen uproar; and all the brass instruments and all the dark uniforms
of the puffy instrumentalists were glittering and melting in the rain.
Occasionally at the end of the street, over the sea, lightning feebly
flickered against a dark cloud. At last I could turn off into a
butcher’s shop, where under the eyes of a score of shopping matrons I
purchased a lovely piece of beef for the nominal price of three francs
seventy-five centimes, and bore it off with pride into the rain.
When we got back to the yacht with well-baptized beef and vegetal
des and tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the
interesting and romantic city. Asked what he was about, he replied:
“I’m going to buy a curio, sir; that’s all.” He knew the city. He had
been to Ostend before in a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither
interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the
country. “There’s a pretty walk over there,” he said; “but there’s
nothing here,” pointing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for
twenty years, and enjoying it like a child, but the deck-hand, with one
soft-voiced sentence, took it off the map.
In the afternoon, winding about among the soaked cosmopolitanism of
the promenade, I was ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy
fashionable affectations more surely than a wet Sunday, and the
promenade seemed to rank first in the forlorn tragedies of the world.
I returned yet again to the yacht, and was met by the skipper with a
disturbed face.
“We can’t get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n’t allowed to work on
Sundays. _Everything’s changed in Belgium._” The skipper was too Dutch
to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was rising in him--the
passion to go somewhere else.
“All right,” I said; “we ‘ll manage with mineral water, and then we ‘ll
move on to Bruges.” In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than
to be standing still.
But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the railway bridge would not
swing for us, nor would it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our
siren. Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skipper. He said that
he was not supposed to swing for _canal-boats_.
“Canal-boat!” the skipper cried. “By what canal do you think I brought
this ship across the North Sea?” He was coldly sarcastic, and his
sarcasm forced the bridge open. We passed through, set our sails, and
were presently heeling over and washing a wave of water up the banks of
the canal. I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge, I shaved
it as close as I could for the fun of the thing. Whereupon the skipper
became excited, and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal,
because the barges were no stronger than cigar-boxes, having sides
only an inch thick, and would crumble at a touch; and the whole
barge-population of Belgium and Holland, but especially Belgium, was in
a conspiracy to extract damages out of yachts on the slightest pretext.
It seemed to me that the skipper’s alarm was exaggerated. I understood
it a few days later, when he related to me that he had once quite
innocently assisted at the cracking of a cigar-box, for which his
employer had had to pay five thousand francs.
[Illustration: 0251]
The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails
set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion
on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good
order.
Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the
weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that
summer! The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through
the water, and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing
than the sails. And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon
of the monotonous tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little
village resembles every other little village. We had to invent something
to pass the time, and we were unwise enough to measure the speed of
the engine on this smooth water in this unusual calm. A speed trial
is nearly always an error of tact, for the reason that it shatters
beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful illusion that under favorable
conditions the engine would drive the yacht at the rate of twelve
kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts at every hundred
meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test gave seven and
a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The distances must be
wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious. The next test
gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to the engine,
and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing even that the
dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of the test
was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.
Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk
along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it,
and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters;
and by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges
in the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better
engine than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth
in a collapse. Nevertheless the _Velsa_ had been a most pleasing object
as seen from the bank.
CHAPTER XVI--BRUGES
WE moored at the Quai Spinola, with one of the most picturesque
views in Bruges in front of us, an irresistible temptation to the
watercolorist, even in wet weather. I had originally visited Bruges
about twenty years earlier. It was the first historical and consistently
beautiful city I had ever seen, and even now it did not appear to have
sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably superior to Ghent, which is a
far more important place, but in which I have never been fortunate.
[Illustration: 0258]
Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a
finer attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the
restaurants of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is
the medieval castle of the counts of Flanders, an endless field for
sociological speculation, but transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent
is a modern town in an old suit of clothes, and its inhabitants are more
formidably Belgian than those of any other large city of Flanders.
I speak not of the smaller industrial places, where Belgianism is
ferocious and terrible.
At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to
Notre Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon
Michelangelo’s “Virgin and Child,” a major work. Then to the streets
and lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth.
Kinematographs, amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be
expected, for no show-city in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do
they not enliven and illumine the ground floors of some of the grandest
renaissance palaces in Florence? But there were changes more startling
than the advent kinematographs.
Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the
street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of
Bruges will be using electricity.
Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals,
and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges “The
Venice of the North.” I admit that my feelings were hurt--not by the
motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the
North, than Venice is the Bruges of the South.
We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and
penetrate us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs
grew more brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the
restaurants of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from
the Grande Place and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the
time of day. Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at
the Hôtel du Panier d’Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with
the fattest landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready
among its bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep.
The Panier d’Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving
tourist who could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to
spend more than seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d’Or
one was sure to encounter other travelers who took both art and life
seriously.
No, we would not dine at the Panier d’Or, because we would not disturb
our memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior,
and we slipped into the café restaurant next door, and were served by
a postulant boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human
nature, but who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with
the exquisite melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to
move. We drank coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white
cloths were removed from the tables; and the long, high room became
a café simply. A few middle-aged male habitués wandered in
separately,--four in all,--and each sat apart and smoked and drank beer.
The mournfulness was sweet and overwhelming. It was like chloroform.
The reflection that each of these sad, aging men had a home and an
_intimité_ somewhere in the spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of
Bruges, that each was a living soul with aspirations and regrets, this
reflection was excruciating in its blend of forlornness and comedy.
A few more habitués entered, and then a Frenchman and a young
Frenchwomen appeared on a dais at the back of the café and opened a
piano. They were in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the
eccentricities of the _cafe-chantant_, and they produced no effect
whatever on the faces or in the gestures of the habitués, They
performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played. Just the common
songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but more inane than
vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red mouth which
is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured disposition
They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody smiled.
Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is
acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habitués doggedly read
newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The
economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices
of food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or
on behalf of the artists.
At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed,
because we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed.
Yes, incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in
Bruges. And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls
in white were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We
glimpsed them through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph
a bell was ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no
habitués were responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of
the belfry flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of
these and of the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps,
after all, Bruges had not changed.
[Illustration: 0263]
We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the
Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of
large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited
by the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much
wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was
supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street,
beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold
it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of
tourists.
As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the
belfry suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the
clockwork chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells,
a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing,
as different from that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a
barrel-organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine
force. Bruges was no more a hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers
and amateur painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their
attendant chaplains. It was the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed
before I had ever even seen the place--just that.
[Illustration: 0267]
Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded
up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again,
reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed
under the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which
are alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according
to the instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the
maze upon a long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was
set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by
high towers, and by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the
lake floated the _Velsa_, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be
real, and yet real. It was the most magical thing.
We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst
of the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had
rounded Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof
enough of the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and
heavy lee-boards for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some
yachtsmen, and expert yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge.
But no ordinary yacht of the _Velsas_ size could have scraped into that
lake by the Quai Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. The
_Velsa_ might have been designed specially for the background of Bruges.
She fitted it with exquisite perfection.
And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered
her more domestic than the very houses around, which were without
exception dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went
gingerly aboard across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning
in gazed again at the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a
little way off the kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a
Parisian couple singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls
coarsely dancing.
PART V--EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES
CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA
AFTER the exoticism of foreign parts, this chapter is very English.
But no island could be more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baffling
than this island. I had a doubt about the propriety of using the phrase
“East Anglia” in the title. I asked, therefore, three educated people
whether the northern part of Essex could be termed East Anglia,
according to current usage. One said he did n’t know. The next said
that East Anglia began only north of the Stour. The third said that East
Anglia extended southward as far as anybody considered that it ought to
extend southward. He was a true Englishman. I agreed with him. England
was not made, but born. It has grown up to a certain extent, and its
pleasure is to be full of anomalies, like a human being. It has to be
seen to be believed.
Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town, twelve miles distant. After
assessment, particulars of it are forwarded to another town in another
county, and the formal demand for payment is made from there; but the
actual payment has to be made in a third town, about twenty miles from
either of the other two. What renders England wondrous is not such
phenomena, but the fact that Englishmen see nothing singular in such
phenomena.
East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of
England, and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very
early in history, and many of their descendants, full of the original
Anglian ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no
place is more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center
on the east coast, and the home port of the _Velsa_. Theoretically
and officially, Harwich is the home port of the _Velsa_, but not in
practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to
accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea,
except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some
excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193
different spellings of the name.
Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was “a member of the Cinque
Ports.” Not _one_ of the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically there
were seven, but a member. A “member” was subordinate, and Brightlingsea
was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared in the
responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven ships
for the king’s service every year. In return it shared in the privilege
of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a few
useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many
decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after
all, it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442.
The charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: “To all the
faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors
and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.” By
this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts,
of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the “bonaventure
mizen”; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity
of the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of
navigation.
Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to
suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing-
or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested
at the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars
kicked up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of
traveling fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships
now at Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea
with an astrolabe; the “bonaventure mizen” is no more; smuggling is
unfashionable; fast craft are encouraged.
Nevertheless, on a summer’s morning I have left the _Velsa_ in the
dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten
minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border
of pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the
whole visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original
Angles first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era
is reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water,
and the Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the
pristine reigns as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of
the scene is indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what
to look for. I was telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful
flatness of Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. “But aren’t you educated
up to flats?” he asked. I said I was. He persisted. “But are you
educated up to mud, the lovely colors on a mud-flat?” He was a true
connoisseur of Essex. The man who is incapable of being ravished by
a thin, shallow tidal stream running between two wide, shimmering mud
banks that curve through a strictly horizontal marsh, without a tree,
without a shrub, without a bird, save an eccentric sea-gull, ought not
to go yachting in Essex estuaries.
[Illustration: 0278]
Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it
catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about
fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular
industry has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort
only yesterday; that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It
has, however, steadily progressed, until now, despite every natural
disadvantage and every negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty
yachts and some eight hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot
get into Brightlingsea at all from the high sea without feeling her
way among sand-banks,--in old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the
inhabitants made a profitable specialty of salving wrecks,--and when a
yacht has successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really
the estuary of the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of
Brightlingsea Creek, her difficulties will multiply.
In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek
is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the
mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake
the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the
Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there
is no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from
the shore, which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these
perils, she will almost certainly run into something, or something
will run into her, or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves.
Yachts, barges, smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored
anywhere and anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack
always deems a yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor
somewhere, and asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or
ever has existed or ever will. Historical tradition--sacred! All craft
do as they like, and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its
sides.
Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can
see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea
and the yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is
uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting.
Yachts go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from
choice. Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place,
because any place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be
a wonderful place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you
can reconcile yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all,
really harmonizes rather well with the mud-flats of the county.
An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is
dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go
for an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always
exciting because you never know when you may be able to return. Even the
_Velsa_, which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle
of the fair and wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages
of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge, facing each other across the river, both
inordinately picturesque, and both given up to the industry of yachting.
At Wivenhoe large yachts and even ships are built, and in winter there
is always a choice selection of world-famous yachts on the mud, costly
and huge gewgaws, with their brass stripped off them, painfully forlorn,
stranded in a purgatory between the paradise of last summer and the
paradise of the summer to come.
If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches,
and as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once
more into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow
stream, two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them.
This is your world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for
several miles; and then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great
barges against a quay, and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and
above the quay rise the towers and steeples of a city that was already
ancient when William the Conqueror came to England in the interests of
civilization to take up the white man’s burden,--Colchester, where more
oysters are eaten on a certain night of the year at a single feast than
at any other feast on earth. Such is the boast.
But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the
contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on
the map of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in
confluence with the River Orwell (which truly _is_ in East Anglia) it
forms a goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a
fairly important naval port, and also “a gate of the empire,” where
steamers go forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We
came into Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon,
with the sea a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the
entrance to the Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, the _Blake_
and the _Blenheim_, each apparently larger than the whole of the town of
Harwich. Up the Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was
moored a fleet of forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in
a quadruple line. It was necessary for the _Velsa_ to review this fleet
of astoundingly ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the
high satisfaction of the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of
Sunday afternoon was thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest.
On every sinister ship--the _Basilisk_, the _Harpy_, etc., apposite
names!--the young bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were
trying bravely to amuse themselves. The sound of the jews’-harp and of
the concertina was heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles
of men squatted here and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing
at some game. A few students were reading; some athletes were sparring;
many others skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines.
Launches and longboats were flitting about full of young men, going
on leave to the ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning
therefrom. Every sound and noise was clearly distinguishable in the
stillness of the hot afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet
as a whole was that of a vast masculine town, for not a woman could be
descried anywhere. It was striking and mournful. When we had got to the
end of the fleet I had a wild idea:
“Let us go up the Stour.”
At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and
pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever
had been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a
ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded.
Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had
quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were
back in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills,
that was all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small
headlands, and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated
that a channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys
nobody could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no
buoys, and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide,
deceptive waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put
about, we dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant
fleet, in another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of
the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached
mysteriously out of one of those bights, and it was maimed by two men
with the air of conspirators.
“D’ ye want a pilot?”
We hardened ourselves.
“No.”
They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.
“Why in thunder is n’t this river buoyed?” I demanded of the skipper.
The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking
the bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No
catastrophe. The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause
again, reversing the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far
to port could be seen a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank.
Impossible that it could indicate the true channel. We went straight
ahead and chanced it. The next instant we were hard on the mud in
midstream, and the propeller was making a terrific pother astern. We
could only wait for the tide to float us off. The rowboat appeared
again.
‘D’ ye want a pilot?”
“No.”
And it disappeared.
When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:
“Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?”
“We ‘ll go on,” I said. I could say no less.
[Illustration: 0288]
We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel
was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of
Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and
seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never a _Velsa_. And yet the smoke of
the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay.
The town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique
sensation that afternoon.
“Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?” said the skipper, adding with a
grin, “There’s only about half an hour left of the flood, and if we get
aground again----”
It was another challenge.
“Yes,” I said.
Manningtree is a town even more recondite than Mistley, and it marks the
very end of the navigable waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the
next corner. We thought we could detect the channel, curving out again
now into midstream. We followed the lure, opened out Manningtree the
desired--and went on the mud with a most perceptible bump. Out, quick,
with the dinghy! Cover her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and
lower an anchor therein and about fifty fathoms of chain, and row away!
We manned the windlass, and dragged the _Velsa_ off the mud.
“Shall we go on, sir?”
“No,” I said, not a hero. “We ‘ll give up Manningtree this trip.”
Obstinacy in adventure might have meant twelve hours in the mud. The
crew breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to civilization.
We knew now why the Stour is a desolate stream. Thus to this day I have
never reached Manningtree except in an automobile.
And there are still stranger waters than the Stour; for example, Hamford
Water, where explosives are manufactured on lonely marshes, where
immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks and owls intermingle, and
public-houses with no public linger on from century to century, and
where the saltings are greener than anywhere else on the coast, and the
east wind more east, and the mud more vivid. And the _Velsa_ has been
there, too.
CHAPTER XVIII--IN SUFFOLK
THE Orwell is reputed to have the finest estuary in East Anglia. It
is a broad stream, and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines
of destruction have been left behind, it begins to be humane and
reassuring. Thanks to the surprising modernity of the town of Ipswich,
which has discovered that there are interests more important than those
of local pilots, it is thoroughly well buoyed, so that the stranger and
the amateur cannot fail to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself
into Suffolk in soft and civilized curves, and displays no wildness
of any kind and, except at one point, very little mud. When you are
navigating the Orwell, you know positively that you are in England.
On each side of you modest but gracefully wooded hills slope down with
caution to the bank, and you have glimpses of magnificent mansions set
in the midst of vast, undulating parks, crisscrossed with perfectly
graveled paths that gleam in the sunshine. Everything here is private
and sacred, and at the gates of the park lodge-keepers guard not only
the paradisiacal acres, but the original ideas that brought the estate
into existence.
Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes with calm confidence in
itself; and even on your yacht’s deck you can feel it, and you are awed.
For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous cohesive force. And
it is a solemn thought that within a mile of you may be a hushed
drawingroom at whose doors the notion of democracy has been knocking
quite in vain for a hundred years. Presently you will hear the sweet and
solemn chimes of a tower-clock, sound which seems to spread peace and
somnolence over half a county. And as you listen, you cannot but be
convinced that the feudal world is august and beautiful, and that it
cannot be improved, and that to overthrow it would be a vandalism. That
is the estuary of the Orwell and its influence. Your pleasure in it will
be unalloyed unless you are so ill-advised as to pull off in the dinghy,
and try to land in one of the lovely demesnes.
About half-way up the estuary, just after passing several big
three-masters moored in midstream and unloading into lighters, you come
to Pinmill, renowned among yachtsmen and among painters. Its haven is
formed out of the angle of a bend in the river, and the narrowness of
the channel at this point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to
the yachts at anchor. Here are all manner of yachts, and you are fairly
certain to see a friend, and pay or receive a visit of state. And also
very probably, if you are on board the Velsa some painter on another
yacht will feel bound to put your strange craft into a sketch. And the
skipper, who has little partiality for these river scenes, will take the
opportunity to go somewhere else on a bicycle. You, too, must go
ashore, because Pinmill is an exhibition-village, entirely picturesque,
paintable, and English. It is liable to send the foreigner into
raptures, and Americans have been known to assert that they could exist
there in happiness forever and ever.
I believe that some person or persons in authority offer prizes to the
peasantry for the prettiest cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but
I should like to see in every picturesque and paint-able English village
a placard stating the number of happy peasants who sleep more than three
in a room, and the number of adult able-bodied males who earn less than
threepence an hour. All aspects of the admirable feudal system ought to
be made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-clock speak loud,
and need no advertisement; cottage gardens also insist on the traveler’s
attention, but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.
[Illustration: 0297]
The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually decide to remain there
over night. In one respect this is a mistake, for the company of yachts
is such that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck attract an
audience, which produces self-consciousness in the exerciser.
Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and Ipswich is a genuine town
that combines industrialism with the historic sense. No American
can afford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a notorious
connection with Mr. Pickwick, and was reproduced entire a lifelike-size at
a world’s fair in the United States. Aware of this important fact,
the second-hand furniture and curio-dealers of the town have adopted
suitable measures. When they have finished collecting, Americans should
go to the docks--as interesting as anything in Ipswich--and see the
old custom-house, with its arch, and the gloriously romantic French
and Scandinavian three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the
principal basin. Times change. Less than eighty years ago the docks of
Ipswich were larger than those of London. And there are men alive and
fighting in Ipswich to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich
shall resume something of her ancient position in the world.
Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the
estuary of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little
ocean air after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there
from to the North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which
is at the mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined
to risk the entrance. According to all printed advice, the entrance
ought not to be risked without local aid. There is a bank at the mouth,
with a patch that dries at low water, and within there is another bank.
The shoals shift pretty frequently, and, worst of all, the tide runs
at the rate of six knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and the
flood only two hours old. We followed the sailing directions, and got in
without trouble just as night fell. The rip of the tide was very marked,
and the coast-guard who boarded us with a coast-guard’s usual curiosity
looked at us as though we were either heroes or rash fools, probably the
latter.
We dropped anchor for the night, and the next morning explored the
estuary, with the tide rising. We soon decided that the perils of this
famous river had been exaggerated. There were plenty of beacons,--which,
by the way, are continually being shifted as the shoals shift,--and
moreover the channel defined itself quite simply, for the reason
that the rest of the winding river-bed was dry. We arrived proudly at
Woodbridge, drawing all the maritime part of the town to look at us, and
we ourselves looked at Woodbridge in a fitting manner, for it is sacred
to the memory not of Omar Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward
Fitzgerald, who well knew the idiosyncrasies of the Deben. Then it was
necessary for us to return, as only for about two hours at each tide is
there sufficient water for a yacht to lie at Woodbridge.
The exit from the Deben was a different affair from the incoming.
Instead of a clearly defined channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The
beacons or perches were still poking up their heads, of course, but they
were of no use, since they had nothing to indicate whether they were
starboard or port beacons. It is such details that harmonize well with
the Old-World air of English estuaries--with the swans, for instance,
those eighteenth-century birds that abound on the Deben. We had to
take our choice of port or starboard. Heaven guided us. We reached the
entrance. The tide was at half-ebb and running like a race; the weather
was unreliable. It was folly to proceed. We proceeded. We had got in
alone; we would get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who bawled
after us. We put the two beacons in a line astern, obedient to the
sailing directions; but we could not keep them in a line. The tide
swirled us away, making naught of the engine. We gave a tremendous
bump. Yes, we were assuredly on the bank for at least ten hours, if not
forever; if it came on to blow, we might well be wrecked. But no. The
ancient _Velsa_ seemed to rebound elastically off the traitorous sand,
and we were afloat again, In two minutes more we were safe. What the
coastguard said is not known to this day. We felt secretly ashamed of
our foolishness, but we were sustained by the satisfaction of having
deprived more local pilots of their fees.
Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the next river-mouth
northward--Orford Haven--we yielded to a base common sense, and signaled
for a pilot. The river Ore is more dangerous to enter, and far more
peculiar even than the Deben. The desolate spot, where it runs into the
sea is well called Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shingles.
The tide runs very fast indeed; the bar shifts after every gale, and not
more than four feet of water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the
bottom is hard. It was probably the hardness of the bottom that finally
induced us to stoop to a pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to
run aground on anything of a rocky nature may be fatal. Our signal was
simply ignored. Not the slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We
were creeping in, and we continued to creep in. The skipper sent the
deck-hand forward with the pole. He called out seven feet, eight feet,
seven feet; but these were Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, because
the pole is a Dutch pole. The water was ominous, full of curling crests
and unpleasant hollows, as the wind fought the current. The deckhand
called out seven, six, five and a half. We could almost feel the ship
bump... and then we were over the bar. Needless to say that a pilot
immediately hove in sight. We waved him off, though he was an old man
with a grievance.
We approached the narrows. We had conquered the worst difficulties by
the sole help of the skipper’s instinct for a channel, for the beacons
were incomprehensible to us; and we imagined that we could get through
the narrows into the river proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair
wind, and we set all sails, and the engine was working well; but there
was more than a six-knot tide rushing out through those narrows, and
we could not get through. We hung in them for about half an hour. Then,
imitating the example of a fisherman who had followed us, we just ran
her nose into the shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped ashore
with a rope. The opportunity to paint a water-color of the _Velsa_
under full sail was not to be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed
knowledge from the fisherman. He informed us that we had not entered by
the channel at all; that we were never anywhere near it. He said that
the channel had four feet at that hour. Thus we learned that local
wisdom is not always omniscience.
After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore on the slack. The Ore is
a very dull river, but it has the pleasing singularity of refusing to
quit the ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel with the
North Sea, separated from it only by a narrow strip of shingle. Under
another name it all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh where at length
it curves inland. On its banks is Orford, a town more dead than any
dead city of the Zuyder Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of
character. The deadness of Orford may be estimated from the fact that
it can support a kinematograph only three nights a week. It has electric
light, but no railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty castle,
a fine church, an antique quay, and a large supply of splendid lobsters.
It knows not the tourist, and has the air of a natural self-preserving
museum.
[Illustration: 0308]
CHAPTER XIX--THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
TIME was when I agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict
that the Orwell is the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I
know it better, I unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is
a nobler stream, a true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its
banks wilder, and its atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of
it is that it does not gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the
Blackwater is September, when the village regattas take place, and the
sunrises over leagues of marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.
Last September the _Velsa_ came early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea
Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is
sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island--which is an island only
during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their home
in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley
of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to
fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real
barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons
or so, fully “dressed,” and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys,
to preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but
the intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and
scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long
lane of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide
to cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive
band which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the
trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose,
and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a
visit--one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their
own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor
before the mast or like a longshore loafer--and told us a tale of an
amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all
her life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her,
he lost his nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a
fisherman at anchor in a dinghy, “Which is the channel?” The fisherman,
seeing a yacht whose lines had been familiar to him for twenty years,
imagined that he was being made fun of. He drawled out, “_You_ know.” In
response to appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out,
“_You_ know.” At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he
drawlingly advised: “Let the old wench alone. Let her alone. _She_ ’ll
find her way in all right.” Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal
stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water
rises. There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the
dead of night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned
round to face the coast-guardsman. “Look here,” said he to the
coast-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any
further. _You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers
nowadays_.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of
this dark st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not
come any further. _You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the
newspapers nowadays_.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the
truth of this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.
The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently
the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with
white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the
lane of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given
moment in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy
events are finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in
the long races have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the
Quarters, and proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames
barges lie, and past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide
was still slack. We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the
Blackwater, and we anchored a few miles below that municipal survival,
in the wildest part of the river, and watched the sun disappear over
vast, flat expanses of water as smooth as oil, with low banks whose
distances were enormously enhanced by the customary optical delusions of
English weather. Close to us was Osea Island, where an establishment for
the reformation of drunkards adds to the weird scene an artistic touch
of the sinister. From the private jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in
process of being reformed gazed at us steadily in the deepening gloom.
Then an attendant came down the jetty and lighted its solitary red eye,
which joined its stare to that of the inebriates.
[Illustration: 0313]
Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the
pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it,
is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not
have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway
service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of
yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle
affords esthetic pleasure.
There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the
Chelmsford Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and
lock-house steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond
the lock was a basin in which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian
schooners discharging timber and all the romance of the North. The
prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage on the canal, at any
rate as far as the next lock, and we asked the lock-keeper how far off
the next lock was. He said curtly:
“Ye can’t go up to the next lock.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was
any more.”
We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a
county town, having a depth of only two feet.
He sharply defended his canal.
“Well,” he ended caustically, “it’s been going on now for a hundred or
a hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day
or two.”
We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we
apologized..
Later--it was a Sunday of glorious weather--we rowed in the dinghy
through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of Maldon
was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were flitting
about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open
sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being
Sunday and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place
was naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but
there was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to
be bored, the ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its
church-topped hill.
Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and
eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger’s residence all complete, as
in the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty
of barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and
indefatigable. I have not yet visited in the _Velsa_ any Continental
port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian
estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was
at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie
in wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind.
Assuredly a Thames barge--said to be the largest craft in the world
sailed by a man and a boy--in full course on the Blackwater is a
noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of
enterprise in transport.
The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company
with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The
distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the
atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl
were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was
not flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The
unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two
thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have
stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a
sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.
At seven o’clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving
water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the
mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely
moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old
white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.
“Is this creek long?” I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek
with the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they
had never seen it before.
“Aye, it’s long.”
“How long is it? Is it a mile?”
“Aye, it’s a mile.”
“Is there anything up there?” Another pause. The boat was drawing away
from me.
“Aye, there’s oysters up there.” The boat and the men withdrew
imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below,
at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village
regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme
beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last
cruise, of the season.
[Illustration: 0320]
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett