CHAPTER XLIX
ON THE WAY TO HOLLAND
I CAME near finding myself in serious straights financially on leaving Berlin; for, owing to an oversight, and the fact that I was lost in pleasant entertainment up to quite the parting hour, on examining my cash in hand I found I had only fifteen marks all told. This was Saturday night and my train was leaving in just thirty minutes. My taxi fare would be two marks. I had my ticket, but excess baggage!—I saw that looming up largely. It could mean anything in Europe—ten, twenty, thirty marks. “Good Heavens!” I thought. “Who is there to cash a letter of credit for me on Saturday night?” I thought of porters, taxis, train hands at Amsterdam. “If I get there at all,” I sighed, “I get there without a cent.” For a minute I thought seriously of delaying my departure and seeking the aid of Herr A. However, I hurried on to the depot where I first had my trunk weighed and found that I should have to pay ten marks excess baggage. That was not so bad. My taxi chauffeur demanded two. My Packträger took one more, my parcel-room clerk, one mark in fees, leaving me exactly one mark and my letter of credit. “Good Heavens!” I sighed. “I can see the expectant customs officers at the border! Without money I shall have to open every one of my bags. I can see the conductor expecting four or five marks and getting nothing. I can see—oh, Lord!”
Still I did not propose to turn back, I did not have time. The clerk at the Amsterdam hotel would have to loan me money on my letter of credit. So I bustled ruminatively into the train. It was a long, dusty affair, coming from St. Petersburg and bound for Holland, Paris, and the boats for England. It was crowded with passengers but, thank Heaven, all of them safely bestowed in separate compartments or “drawing-rooms” after the European fashion. I drew my blinds, undressed swiftly and got into bed. Let all conductors rage, I thought. Porters be damned. Frontier inspectors could go to blazes. I am going to sleep, my one mark in my coat pocket.
I was just dozing off when the conductor called to ask if I did not want to surrender the keys to my baggage in order to avoid being waked in the morning at the frontier. This service merited a tip which, of course, I was in no position to give. “Let me explain to you,” I said. “This is the way it is. I got on this train with just one mark.” I tried to make it clear how it all happened, in my halting German.
He was a fine, tall, military, solid-chested fellow. He looked at me with grave, inquisitive eyes. “I will come in a little later,” he grunted. Instead, he shook me rudely at five-thirty A. M., at some small place in Holland, and told me that I would have to go out and open my trunk. Short shrift for the man who cannot or will not tip!
Still I was not so downcast. For one thing we were in Holland, actually and truly,—quaint little Holland with its five million population crowded into cities so close together that you could get from one to another in a half-hour or a little over. To me, it was first and foremost the land of Frans Hals and Rembrandt van Ryn and that whole noble company of Dutch painters. All my life I had been more or less fascinated by those smooth surfaces, the spirited atmosphere, those radiant simplicities of the Dutch interiors, the village inns, windmills, canal scenes, housewives, fishwives, old topers, cattle, and nature scenes which are the basis and substance of Dutch art. I will admit, for argument’s sake, that the Dutch costume with its snowy neck and head-piece and cuffs, the Dutch windmill, with its huge wind-bellied sails, the Dutch landscape so flat and grassy and the Dutch temperament, broad-faced and phlegmatic, have had much to do with my art attraction, but over and beyond those there has always been so much more than this—an indefinable something which, for want of a better phrase, I can only call the wonder of the Dutch soul, the most perfect expression of commonplace beauty that the world has yet seen. So easily life runs off into the mystical, the metaphysical, the emotional, the immoral, the passionate and the suggestive, that for those delicate flaws of perfection in which life is revealed static, quiescent, undisturbed, innocently gay, naïvely beautiful, how can we be grateful enough! For those lovely, idyllic minds that were content to paint the receipt of a letter, an evening school, dancing peasants, a gust of wind, skaters, wild ducks, milk-time, a market, playing at draughts, the fruiterer, a woman darning stockings, a woman scouring, the drunken roysterers, a cow stall, cat and kittens, the grocer’s shop, the chemist’s shop, the blacksmith’s shop, feeding-time, and the like, my heart has only reverence. And it is not (again) this choice of subject alone, nor the favorable atmosphere of Holland in which these were found, so much as it is that delicate refinement of soul, of perception, of feeling—the miracle of temperament—through which these things were seen. Life seen through a temperament! that is the miracle of art.
Yet the worst illusion that can be entertained concerning art is that it is apt to appear at any time in any country, through a given personality or a group of individuals without any deep relation to much deeper mystical and metaphysical things. Some little suggestion of the artistry of life may present itself now and then through a personality, but art in the truest sense is the substance of an age, the significance of a country—a nationality. Even more than that, it is a time-spirit (the Zeitgeist of the Germans) that appears of occasion to glorify a land, to make great a nation. You would think that somewhere in the sightless substance of things—the chemistry back of the material evidence of life—there was a lovely, roseate milling of superior principle at times. Strange and lovely things come to the fore—the restoration in England, the Renaissance in Italy, Florence’s golden period, Holland’s classic art—all done in a century. “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and there was that which we know as art.
I think it was years before those two towering figures—Rembrandt and Frans Hals (and of the two, Frans Hals is to me the greater)—appeared in my consciousness and emphasized the distinction of Holland for me, showing me that the loveliness of Dutch art,—the naïveté of Wouverman, the poetic realism of Nicolaes Maes, the ultimate artistry of Vermeer, de Hoogh, Ruysdael and all that sweet company of simple painters of simple things,—had finally come to mean to me all that I can really hope for in art—those last final reflections of halcyon days which are the best that life has to show.
Sometimes when I think of the homely splendors of Dutch art, which in its delicate commonplaceness has nothing to do with the more universal significance of both Hals and Rembrandt, I get a little wild artistically. Those smooth persuasive surfaces—pure enamel—and symphonies of blue light which are Vermeer; those genial household intimacies and candle-light romances which are Dou; those alleluiahs of light and water which are Vandervelde, Backhysen, Van Goyen; those merry-makings, perambulations, doorway chats, poultry intimacies, small trade affections and exchanges which are Terburg and Van Ostade! Truly, words fail me. I do not know how to suggest the poetry, the realism, the mood, the artistic craftsmanship that go with these things. They suggest a time, a country, an age, a mood, which is at once a philosophy, a system, a spirit of life. What more can art be? What more can it suggest? How, in that fortune of chance, which combines it with color-sense, temperament, craft, can it be exceeded? And all of this is what Dutch art—those seemingly minor phases, after Hals and Rembrandt—means to me.
But I was in Holland now, and not concerned so much for the moment with Dutch art as with my trunks. Still I felt here, at the frontier, that already I was in an entirely different world. Gone was that fever of the blood which is Germany. Gone the heavy, involute, enduring, Teutonic architecture. The upstanding German,—kaiserlich, self-opinionated, drastic, aggressive—was no longer about me. The men who were unlocking trunks and bags here exemplified a softer, milder, less military type. This mystery of national temperaments—was I never to get done with it? As I looked about me against a pleasant rising Sunday sun I could see and feel that not only the people but the landscape and the architecture had changed. The architecture was obviously so different, low, modest, one-story cottages standing out on a smooth, green level land, so smooth and so green and so level that anything projected against the skyline—it mattered not how modest—thereby became significant. And I saw my first Holland windmill turning its scarecrow arms in the distance. It was like coming out of a Russian steam bath into the cool marble precincts of the plunge, to be thus projected from Germany into Holland. If you will believe me I was glad that I had no money in order that I might be driven out to see all this.
* * * * *
I had no trouble with trunks and bags other than opening them and being compelled to look as though I thought it a crime to tip anybody. I strolled about the station in the early light of a clear, soft day and speculated on this matter of national temperaments. What a pity, I thought, if Holland were ever annexed by Germany or France or any country and made to modify its individuality. Before I was done with it I was inclined to believe that its individuality would never be modified, come any authority that might.
The balance of the trip to Amsterdam was nothing, a matter of two hours, but it visualized all I had fancied concerning Holland. Such a mild little land it is. So level, so smooth, so green. I began to puzzle out the signs along the way; they seemed such a hodge-podge of German and English badly mixed, that I had to laugh. The train passed up the center of a street in one village where cool brick pavements fronted cool brick houses and stores, and on one shop window appeared the legend: “Haar Sniden.” Would not that as a statement of hair-cutting make any German-American laugh? “Telefoon,” “stoom boot,” “treins noor Ostend,” “land te koop” (for sale) and the like brought a mild grin of amusement.
When we reached Amsterdam I had scarcely time to get a sense of it before I was whisked away in an electric omnibus to the hotel; and I was eager to get there, too, in order to replenish my purse which was now without a single penny. The last mark had gone to the porter at the depot to carry my bags to this ’bus. I was being deceived as to the character of the city by this ride from the central station to the hotel, for curiously its course gave not a glimpse of the canals that are the most charming and pleasing features of Amsterdam—more so than in any other city in Holland.
And now what struggles for a little ready money! My bags and fur coat had been duly carried into the hotel and I had signified to the porter in a lordly way that he should pay the ’busman, but seeing that I had letters which might result in local invitations this very day a little ready cash was necessary.
“I tell you what I should like you to do,” I observed to the clerk, after I had properly entered my name and accepted a room. “Yesterday in Berlin, until it was too late, I forgot to draw any money on my letter of credit. Let me have forty gulden and I will settle with you in the morning.”
“But, my dear sir,” he said, very doubtfully indeed and in very polite English, “I do not see how we can do that. We do not know you.”
“It is surely not so unusual,” I suggested ingratiatingly, “you must have done it before. You see my bags and trunk are here. Here is my letter of credit. Let me speak to the manager.”
The dapper Dutchman looked at my fur coat and bags quite critically, looked at my letter of credit as if he felt sure it was a forgery and then retired into an inner office. Presently a polished creature appeared, dark, immaculate, and after eyeing me solemnly, shook his head. “It can’t be done,” he said.
He turned to go.
“But here, here!” I called. “This won’t do. You must be sensible. What sort of a hotel do you keep here, anyhow? I must have forty gulden—thirty, anyhow. My letter of credit is good. Examine it. Good heavens! You have at least eight hundred gulden worth of luggage there.”
He had turned and was surveying me again. “It can’t be done,” he said.
“Impossible!” I cried. “I must have it. Why, I haven’t a cent. You must trust me until to-morrow morning.”
“Give him twenty gulden,” he said to the clerk, wearily, and turned away.
“Good Heavens!” I said to the clerk, “give me the twenty gulden before I die of rage.” And so he counted them out to me and I went in to breakfast.
I was charmed to find that the room overlooked one of the lovely canals with a distant view of others—all of them alive with canal-boats poled along slowly by solid, placid Hollanders, the spring sunlight giving them a warm, alluring, mildly adventurous aspect. The sense of light on water was so delightful from the breakfast-room, a great airy place, that it gave an added flavor to my Sunday morning breakfast of eggs and bacon. I was so pleased with my general surroundings here that I even hummed a tune while I ate.