But Peter, my boatman, cap in hand, is waiting on the cobbles outside
the inn door. He has served me these many years. He is a wiry, thin,
pinch-faced Dutchman, of perhaps sixty, who spent his early life at
sea as man-o'-war's-man, common sailor, and then mate, and his later
years at home in Dort, picking up odd jobs of ferriage or stevedoring,
or making early gardens. While on duty he wears an old white
traveling-cap pulled over his eyes, and a flannel shirt without collar
or tie, and sail-maker's trousers. These trousers are caught at his
hips by a leather strap supporting a sheath which holds his knife. He
cuts everything with this knife, from apples and navy plug to ship's
cables and telegraph wire. His clothes are waterproof; they must be,
for no matter how hard it rains, Peter is always dry. The water may
pour in rivulets from off his cap, and run down his forehead and from
the end of his gargoyle of a nose, but no drop ever seems to wet his
skin. When it rains the fiercest, I, of course, retreat under the
poke-bonnet awning made of cotton duck stretched over barrel hoops
that protects the stern of my boat, but Peter never moves. This Dutch
rain does not in any way affect him. It is like the Jersey
mosquito--it always spares the natives.
Peter speaks two languages, both Dutch. He says that one is English,
but he cannot prove it--nobody can. When he opens his mouth you know
all about his ridiculous pretensions. He says--"Mynheer, dot manus ist
er blowdy rock." He has learned this expression from the English
sailors unloading coal at the big docks opposite Pappendrecht, and he
has incorporated this much of their slang into his own nut-cracking
dialect. He means of course "that man is a bloody rogue." He has a
dozen other phrases equally obscure.
Peter's mission this first morning after my arrival is to report that
the good ship Red Tub is now lying in the harbor fully equipped for
active service. That her aft awning has been hauled taut over its
hoops; that her lockers of empty cigar boxes (receptacles for brushes)
have been clewed up; the cocoa-matting rolled out the whole length of
her keel, and finally that the water bucket and wooden chair (I use a
chair instead of an easel) have been properly stowed.
Before the next raincloud spills over its edges, we must loosen the
painter from the iron ring rusted tight in the square stone in the
wharf, man the oars, and creep under the little bridge that binds
Boudier's landing to the sidewalk over the way, and so set our course
for the open Maas. For I am in search of Dutch boats to-day, as near
like Clays's as I can find. I round the point above the old India
warehouses, I catch sight of the topmasts of two old luggers anchored
in midstream, their long red pennants flattened against the gray sky.
The wind is fresh from the east, filling the sails of the big
windmills blown tight against their whirling arms. The fishing-smacks
lean over like dipping gulls; the yellow water of the Maas is flecked
with wavy lines of beer foam.
The good ship Red Tub is not adapted to outdoor sketching under these
conditions. The poke-bonnet awning acts as a wind-drag that no amount
of hard pulling can overcome. So I at once convene the Board of
Strategy, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Jansen, Red Tub Navy, in the
chair. That distinguished naval expert rises from his water-soaked
seat on the cocoa-matting outside the poke bonnet, sweeps his eye
around the horizon, and remarks sententiously:--
"It no tam goot day. Blow all dime; we go ba'd-hoose," and he turns
the boat toward a low-lying building anchored out from the main shore
by huge chains secured to floating buoys.
In some harbors sea-faring men are warned not to "anchor over the
water-pipes." In others particular directions are given to avoid
"submarine cables planted here." In Dort, where none of these modern
conveniences exist, you are notified as follows: "No boats must land
at this Bath."
If Peter knew of this rule he said not one word to me as I sat back
out of the wet, hived under the poke bonnet, squeezing color-tubes and
assorting my brushes. He rowed our craft toward the bath-house with
the skill of a man-o'-war's-man, twisted the painter around a short
post, and unloaded my paraphernalia on a narrow ledge or plank walk
some three feet wide, and which ran around the edge of the floating
bath-house.
It never takes me long to get to work, once my subject is selected. I
sprang from the boat while Peter handed me the chair, stool, and
portfolio containing my stock of gray papers of different tones;
opened my sketch frame, caught a sheet of paper tight between its
cleats; spread palettes and brushes on the floor at my side; placed
the water bucket within reach of my hand, and in five minutes I was
absorbed in my sketch.
Immediately the customary thing happened. The big bank of gray cloud
that hung over the river split into feathery masses of white framed in
blue, and out blazed the glorious sun.
Meantime, Peter had squatted close beside me, sheltered under the lee
of the side wall of the bath-house, protected equally from the slant
of the driving rain and the glare of the blinding sun. Safe too from
the watchful eye of the High Pan-Jam who managed the bath, and who at
the moment was entirely oblivious of the fact that only two inches of
pine board separated him from an enthusiastic painter working like
mad, and an equally alert marine assistant who supplied him with fresh
water and charcoal points, both at the moment defying the law of the
land, one in ignorance and the other in a spirit of sheer bravado. For
Peter must have known the code and the penalty.
The world is an easy place for a painter to live and breathe in when
he is sitting far from the madding crowd--of boys--protected from the
wind and sun, watching a sky piled up in mountains of snow, and
inhaling ozone that is a tonic to his lungs. When the outline of his
sketch is complete and the colors flow and blend, and the heart is on
fire; when the bare paper begins to lose itself in purple distances
and long stretches of tumbling water, and the pictured boats take
definite shape, and the lines of the rigging begin to tell; when
little by little, with a pat here and a dab there, there comes from
out this flat space a something that thrilled him when he first
determined to paint the thing that caught his eye,--not the thing
itself, but the spirit, the soul, the feeling, and meaning of the
color-poem unrolled before him,--when a painter feels a thrill like
this, all the fleets of Spain might bombard him, and his eye would
never waver nor his touch hesitate.