He came up, hat in hand. But there was no sign of weakening. The blood
of the Jansens was still in his eye.
"What did they arrest you for, Peter?"
"For make jaw wid de tam bolice. He say I mos' pay two gulden or one
tay in jail. Oh, it is notting; I no pay. Dot bolice lie ven he say
vimmen ba'd. Nopoty ba'd in de hoose aft' s'welve 'clook."
Later, Heer Boudier tells me that because of Peter's action in
resisting the officer in the discharge of his duty, he is under
arrest, and that he has but _five days in which to make up his mind_
as to whether he will live on bread and water for a day and night in
the town jail, or whether he will deplete his slender savings in favor
of the state to the extent of two gulden.
"But don't they lock him up, meanwhile?" I asked.
Boudier laughed. "Where would he run to, and for what? To save two
gulden?"
My heart was touched. I could not possibly allow Peter to spend five
minutes in jail on my account. I should not have slept one wink that
night even in my luxurious bed-box with English pillows, knowing that
the Lieutenant-Commander was stretched out on a cold floor with a
cobblestone under his cheek. I knew, too, how slender was his store,
and what a godsend my annual visit had been to his butcher and baker.
The Commander of the Red Tub might be impetuous, even aggressive, but
by no possible stretch of the imagination could he be considered
criminal.
That night I added these two gulden (about eighty cents) to Peter's
wages. He thanked me with a pleased twinkle in his eye, and a
wrinkling of the leathery skin around his nose and mouth. Then he put
on his cap and disappeared up the street.
* * * * *
But the inns, quaint canals, and rain-washed streets are not Dort's
only distinctions. There is an ancient Groote Kerk, overlaid with
colors that are rarely found outside of Holland. It is built of brick,
with a huge square tower that rises above the great elms pressing
close about it, and which is visible for miles. The moist climate not
only encrusts its twelfth-century porch with brown-and-green patches
of lichen over the red tones, but dims the great stained-glass windows
with films of mould, and covers with streaks of Hooker's green the
shadow sides of the long sloping roofs. Even the brick pavements about
it are carpeted with strips of green, as fresh in color as if no
passing foot had touched them. And few feet ever do touch them, for it
is but a small group of worshipers that gather weekly within the old
kirk's whitewashed walls.
[Illustration: AN ANCIENT GROOTE KERK]
These faithful few do not find the rich interior of the olden time,
for many changes have come over it since its cathedral days, the days
of its pomp and circumstance. All its old-time color is gone when you
enter its portals, and only staring white walls and rigid, naked
columns remain; only dull gray stone floors and hard, stiff-backed
benches. I have often sat upon these same benches in the gloom of a
fast-fading twilight and looked about me, bemoaning the bareness, and
wondering what its _ensemble_ must have been in the days of its
magnificence. There is nothing left of its glories now but its
architectural lines. The walls have been stripped of their costly
velvets, tapestries, and banners of silk and gold, the uplifted cross
is gone; the haze of swinging censers no longer blurs the vistas, nor
the soft light of many tapers illumines their gloom.
I have always believed that duty and beauty should ever go hand in
hand in our churches. To me there is nothing too rich in tone, too
luxurious in color, too exquisite in line for the House of God.
Nothing that the brush of the painter can make glorious, the chisel of
the sculptor beautify, or the T-square of the architect ennoble, can
ever be out of place in the one building of all others that we
dedicate to the Creator of all beauty. I have always thanked Him for
his goodness in giving as much thought to the flowers that cover the
hillsides as He did to the dull earth that lies beneath; as much care
to the matchings of purples and gold in the sunsets as to the
blue-black crags that are outlined against them. With these feelings
in my heart I have never understood that form of worship which
contents itself with a bare barn filled with seats of pine, a square
box of a pulpit, a lone pitcher of ice water, and a popular edition of
the hymns. But then, I am not a Dutchman.
Besides this town of Dort, filled with queer warehouses, odd
buildings, and cobbled streets, and dominated by this majestic
cathedral, there is across the river--just a little way (Peter rows me
over in ten minutes)--the Noah's Ark town of Pappendrecht, surrounded
by great stretches of green meadow, dotted with black and white cows,
and acres and acres of cabbages and garden truck, and tiny farmhouses,
and absurdly big barns; and back of these, and in order to keep all
these dry, is a big dike that goes on forever and is lost in the
perspective. On both sides of this dike (its top is a road) are built
the toy houses facing each other, each one cleaner and better scrubbed
than its neighbor, their big windows gay with geraniums.
Farther down is another 'recht--I cannot for the life of me remember
the first part of its name--where there is a shipyard and big
windlasses and a horse hitched to a sweep, which winds up water-soaked
luggers on to rude ways, and great pots of boiling tar, the yellow
smoke drifting away toward the sea.
And between these towns of Dort, Pappendrecht, and the other 'recht
moves a constant procession of water craft; a never-ceasing string of
low, rakish barges that bear the commerce of Germany out to the sea,
each in charge of a powerful tug puffing eagerly in its hurry to reach
tide water, besides all the other boats and luggers that sail and
steam up and down the forked Maas in front of Boudier's Inn--for Dort
is really on an island, the water of the Rhine being divided here. You
would never think, were you to watch these ungainly boats, that they
could ever arrive anywhere. They look as if they were built to go
sideways, endways, or both ways; and yet they mind their helms and
dodge in and out and swoop past the long points of land ending in the
waving marsh grass, and all with the ease of a steam yacht.
* * * * *
These and a hundred other things make me love this quaint old town on
the Maas. There is everything within its borders for the painter who
loves form and color--boats, queer houses, streets, canals, odd,
picturesque interiors, figures, brass milk cans, white-capped girls,
and stretches of marsh. If there were not other places on the earth I
love equally as well--Venice, for instance--I would be content never
to leave its shower-drenched streets. But I know that my gondola, gay
in its new _tenta_ and polished brasses, is waiting for me in the
little canal next the bridge, and I must be off.
Tyne has already packed my trunk, and Johan is ready to take it down
the stairs. Tyne sent for him. I did not.
When Johan, like an overloaded burro stumbling down the narrow defile
of the staircase, my trunk on his back, disappears through the lower
door, Tyne reenters my room, closes the door softly, and tells me that
Johan's wages have been raised, and that before I return next summer
she and--
But I forgot. This is another strictly confidential communication.
Under no possible circumstances could a man of honor--certainly not.
Peter, to my surprise, is not in his customary place when I reach the
outer street door. Johan, at my inquiring gesture, grins the width of
his face, but has no information to impart regarding Peter's unusual
absence.
Heer Boudier is more explicit.
"Where's Peter?" I cry with some impatience.
My host shrugs his shoulders with a helpless movement, and opens wide
the fingers of both hands.
"Mynheer, the five days are up. Peter has gone to jail."
"What for?" I ask in astonishment.
"To save two gulden."