There be inns in Holland--not hotels, not pensions, nor
stopping-places--just inns. The Bellevue at Dort is one, and the
Holland Arms is another, and the--no, there are no others. Dort only
boasts these two, and Dort to me is Holland.
The rivalry between these two inns has been going on for years, and it
still continues. The Bellevue, fighting for place, elbowed its way
years ago to the water-line, and took its stand on the river-front,
where the windows and porticos could overlook the Maas dotted with
boats. The Arms, discouraged, shrank back into its corner, and made up
in low windows, smoking-rooms, and private bathroom--one for the whole
house--what was lacking in porticos and sea view. Then followed a
slight skirmish in paint,--red for the Arms and yellow-white for the
Bellevue; and a flank movement of shades and curtains,--linen for the
Arms and lace for the Bellevue. Scouting parties were next ordered out
of porters in caps, banded with silk ribbons, bearing the names of
their respective hostelries. Yacob of the Arms was to attack weary
travelers on alighting from the train, and acquaint them with the
delights of the downstairs bath, and the dark-room for the kodakers,
all free of charge. And Johan of the Bellevue was to give minute
descriptions of the boats landing in front of the dining-room windows
and of the superb view of the river.
* * * * *
It is always summer when I arrive in Dordrecht. I don't know what
happens in winter, and I don't care. The groundhog knows enough to go
into his hole when the snow begins to fly, and to stay there until the
sun thaws him out again. Some tourists could profit by following his
example.
[Illustration: THROUGH STREETS EMBOWERED IN TREES]
It is summer then, and the train has rolled into the station at
Dordrecht, or beside it, and the traps have been thrown out, and
Peter, my boatman--he of the "Red Tub," a craft with an outline like a
Dutch vrou, quite as much beam as length (we go a-sketching in this
boat)--Peter, I say, who has come to the train to meet me, has swung
my belongings over his shoulder, and Johan, the porter of the
Bellevue, with a triumphant glance at Yacob of the Arms, has stowed
the trunk on the rear platform of the street tram,--no cabs or trucks,
if you please, in this town,--and the one-horse car has jerked its way
around short curves and up through streets embowered in trees and
paved with cobblestones scrubbed as clean as china plates, and over
quaint bridges with glimpses of sluggish canals and queer houses, and
so on to my lodgings.
And mine host, Heer Boudier, waiting on the steps, takes me by the
hand and says the same room is ready and has been for a week.
Inside these two inns, the only inns in Dort, the same rivalry exists.
But my parallels must cease. Mine own inn is the Bellevue, and my old
friend of fifteen years, Heer Boudier, is host, and so loyalty compels
me to omit mention of any luxuries but those to which I am accustomed
in his hostelry.
Its interior has peculiar charms for me. Scrupulously clean, simple in
its appointments and equipment, it is comfort itself. Tyne is
responsible for its cleanliness--or rather, that particular portion of
Tyne which she bares above her elbows. Nobody ever saw such a pair of
sledge-hammer arms as Tyne's on any girl outside of Holland. She is
eighteen; short, square-built, solid as a Dutch cheese, fresh and rosy
as an English milkmaid; moon-faced, mild-eyed as an Alderney heifer,
and as strong as a three-year-old. Her back and sides are as straight
as a plank; the front side is straight too. The main joint in her body
is at the hips. This is so flexible that, wash-cloth in hand, she can
lean over the floor without bending her knees and scrub every board in
it till it shines like a Sunday dresser. She wears a snow-white cap as
dainty as the finest lady's in the land; an apron that never seems to
lose the crease of the iron, and a blue print dress bunched up behind
to keep it from the slop. Her sturdy little legs are covered by gray
yarn stockings which she knits herself, the feet thrust into wooden
sabots. These clatter over the cobbles as she scurries about with a
crab-like movement, sousing, dousing, and scrubbing as she goes; for
Tyne attacks the sidewalk outside with as much gusto as she does the
hall and floors.
Johan the porter moves the chairs out of Tyne's way when she begins
work, and, lately, I have caught him lifting her bucket up the front
steps--a wholly unnecessary proceeding when Tyne's muscular
developments are considered. Johan and I had a confidential talk one
night, when he brought the mail to my room,--the room on the second
floor overlooking the Maas,--in which certain personal statements were
made. When I spoke to Tyne about them the next day, she looked at me
with her big blue eyes, and then broke into a laugh, opening her mouth
so wide that every tooth in her head flashed white (they always
reminded me somehow of peeled almonds). With a little bridling twist
of her head she answered that--but, of course, this was a strictly
confidential communication, and of so entirely private a nature that
no gentleman under the circumstances would permit a single word of it
to--
Johan is taller than Tyne, but not so thick through. When he meets you
at the station, with his cap and band in his hand, his red hair
trimmed behind as square as the end of a whisk-broom, his thin,
parenthesis legs and Vienna guardsman waist,--each detail the very
opposite, you will note, from Tyne's,--you recall immediately one of
George Boughton's typical Dutchmen. The only thing lacking is his
pipe; he is too busy for that.
When he dons his dress suit for dinner, and bending over your shoulder
asks, in his best English: "Mynheer, don't it now de feesh you haf?"
you lose sight of Boughton's Dutchman and see only the cosmopolitan.
The transformation is due entirely to continental influences--Dort
being one of the main highways between London and Paris--influences so
strong that even in this water-logged town on the Maas, bonnets are
beginning to replace caps, and French shoes sabots.
The guests that Johan serves at this inn of my good friend Boudier are
as odd looking as its interior. They line both sides and the two ends
of the long table. Stout Germans in horrible clothes, with stouter
wives in worse; Dutchmen from up-country in brown coats and green
waistcoats; clerks off on a vacation with kodaks and Cook's tickets;
bicyclists in knickerbockers; painters, with large kits and small
handbags, who talk all the time and to everybody; gray-whiskered,
red-faced Englishmen, with absolutely no conversation at all, who
prove to be distinguished persons attended by their own valets, and on
their way to Aix or the Engadine, now that the salmon-fishing in
Norway is over; school teachers from America, just arrived from
Antwerp or Rotterdam, or from across the channel by way of Harwich,
their first stopping-place really since they left home--one
traveling-dress and a black silk in the bag; all the kinds and
conditions and sorts of people who seek out precious little places
like Dort, either because they are cheap or comfortable, or because
they are known to be picturesque.
I sought out Dort years ago because it was untouched by the hurry that
makes life miserable, and the shams that make it vulgar, and I go back
to it now every year of my life, in spite of other foreign influences.
[Illustration: THE GOSSIPS LEAN IN THE DOORWAYS]
And there is no real change in fifteen years. Its old trees still nod
over the sleepy canals in the same sleepy way they have done, no
doubt, for a century. The rooks--the same rooks, they never die--still
swoop in and out of the weather-stained arches high up in the great
tower of the Groote Kerk, the old twelfth-century church, the tallest
in all Holland; the big-waisted Dutch luggers with rudders painted
arsenic green--what would painters do without this green?--doze under
the trees, their mooring lines tied to the trunks; the girls and boys,
with arms locked, a dozen together, clatter over the cobbles, singing
as they walk; the steamboats land and hurry on--"Fop Smit's boats" the
signs read--it is pretty close, but I am not part owner in the line;
the gossips lean in the doorways or under the windows banked with
geraniums and nasturtiums; the cumbersome state carriages with the big
ungainly horses with untrimmed manes and tails--there are only five of
these carriages in all Dordrecht--wait in front of the great houses
eighty feet wide and four stories high, some dating as far back as
1512, and still occupied by descendants of the same families; the old
women in ivory black, with dabs of Chinese white for sabots and caps,
push the same carts loaded with Hooker's green vegetables from door to
door; the town crier rings his bell; the watchman calls the hour.
Over all bends the ever-changing sky, one hour close-drawn, gray-lined
with slanting slashes of blinding rain, the next piled high with great
domes of silver-white clouds inlaid with turquoise blue or hemmed in
by low-lying ranges of purple peaks capped with gold.
* * * * *
I confess that an acute sense of disappointment came over me when I
first saw these gray canals, rain-varnished streets, and rows of green
trees. I recognized at a glance that it was not my Holland; not the
Holland of my dreams; not the Holland of Mesdag nor Poggenbeck nor
Kever. It was a fresher, sweeter, more wholesome land, and with a more
breathable air. These Dutch painters had taught me to look for dull,
dirty skies, soggy wharves, and dismal perspectives of endless dikes.
They had shown me countless windmills, scattered along stretches of
wind-swept moors backed by lowering skies, cold gray streets, quaint,
leanover houses, and smudgy, grimy interiors. They had enveloped all
this in the stifling, murky atmosphere of a western city slowly
strangling in clouds of coal smoke.
These Dutch artists were, perhaps, not alone in this falsification. It
is one of the peculiarities of modern art that many of its masters
cater to the taste of a public who want something that _is not_ in
preference to something that _is_. Ziem, for instance, had, up to the
time of my enlightenment, taught me to love an equally untrue and
impossible Venice--a Venice all red and yellow and deep ultra-marine
blue--a Venice of unbuildable palaces and blazing red walls.
I do not care to say so aloud, where I can be heard over the way, but
if you will please come inside my quarters, and shut the door and
putty up the keyhole, and draw down the blinds, I will whisper in your
ear that my own private opinion is that even Turner himself would have
been an infinitely greater artist had he built his pictures on Venice
instead of building them on Turner. I will also be courageous enough
to assert that the beauty and dignity of Venetian architecture--an
architecture which has delighted many appreciative souls for
centuries--finds no place in his canvases, either in detail or in
mass. The details may be unimportant, for the soft vapor of the
lagoons ofttimes conceals them, but the correct outline of the
mass--that is, for instance, the true proportion of the dome of the
Salute, that incomparable, incandescent pearl, or the vertical line of
the Campanile compared to the roofs of the connecting palaces--should
never be ignored, for they are as much a part of Venice, the part that
makes for beauty, as the shimmering light of the morning or the glory
of its sunsets. So it is that when most of us for the first time reach
the water-gates of Venice, the most beautiful of all cities by the
sea, we feel a certain shock and must begin to fall in love with a new
sweetheart.
So with many painters of the Holland school--not the old Dutch school
of landscape painters, but the more modern group of men who paint
their native skies with zinc-white toned with London fog, or mummy
dust and bitumen. It is all very artistic and full of "tone," but it
is not Holland.
There is Clays, for instance. Of all modern painters Clays has charmed
and wooed us best with certain phases of Holland life, particularly
the burly brown boats lying at anchor, their red and white sails
reflected in the water. I love these boats of Clays. They are superbly
drawn, strong in color, and admirably painted; the water treatment,
too, is beyond criticism. But where are they in Holland? I know
Holland from the Zuyder Zee to Rotterdam, but I have never yet seen
one of Clays's boats in the original wood.
Thus by reason of such smeary, up and down fairy tales in paint have
we gradually become convinced that vague trees, and black houses with
staring patches of whitewash, and Vandyke brown roofs are thoroughly
characteristic of Holland, and that the blessed sun never shines in
this land of sabots.
[Illustration: DRENCHED LEAVES QUIVERING]
But doesn't it rain? Yes, about half the time, perhaps three quarters
of the time. Well, now that I think of it, about all the time. But not
continuously; only in intermittent downpours, floods, gushes of
water--not once a day but every half hour. Then comes the quick
drawing of a gray curtain from a wide expanse of blue, framing ranges
of snow-capped cumuli; streets swimming in great pools; drenched
leaves quivering in dazzling sunlight, and millions of raindrops
flashing like diamonds.