Part 17

What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all about one. Maybe to the Dutchman there are drawbacks. In a Dutch household life must be one long spring-cleaning. No milk-pail is considered fit that cannot just as well be used for a looking-glass. The great brass pans, hanging under the pent house roof outside the cottage door, flash like burnished gold. You could eat your dinner off the red-tiled floor, but that the deal table, scrubbed to the colour of cream cheese, is more convenient. By each threshold stands a row of empty sabots, and woe-betide the Dutchman who would dream of crossing it in anything but his stockinged feet.

There is a fashion in sabots. Every spring they are freshly painted. One district fancies an orange yellow, another a red, a third white, suggesting purity and innocence. Members of the Smart Set indulge in ornamentation; a frieze in pink, a star upon the toe. Walking in sabots is not as easy as it looks. Attempting to run in sabots I do not recommend to the beginner.

“How do you run in sabots?” I asked a Dutchman once. I had been experimenting, and had hurt myself.

“We don’t run,” answered the Dutchman.

And observation has proved to me he was right. The Dutch boy, when he runs, puts them for preference on his hands, and hits other Dutch boys over the head with them as he passes.

The roads in Holland, straight and level, and shaded all the way with trees, look, from the railway-carriage window, as if they would be good for cycling; but this is a delusion. I crossed in the boat from Harwich once, with a well-known black and white artist, and an equally well-known and highly respected humorist. They had their bicycles with them, intending to tour Holland. I met them a fortnight later in Delft, or, rather, I met their remains. I was horrified at first. I thought it was drink. They could not stand still, they could not sit still, they trembled and shook in every limb, their teeth chattered when they tried to talk. The humorist hadn’t a joke left in him. The artist could not have drawn his own salary; he would have dropped it on the way to his pocket. The Dutch roads are paved their entire length with cobbles—big, round cobbles, over which your bicycle leaps and springs and plunges.

If you would see Holland outside the big towns a smattering of Dutch is necessary. If you know German there is not much difficulty. Dutch—I speak as an amateur—appears to be very bad German mis-pronounced. Myself, I find my German goes well in Holland, even better than in Germany. The Anglo-Saxon should not attempt the Dutch G. It is hopeless to think of succeeding, and the attempt has been known to produce internal rupture. The Dutchman appears to keep his G in his stomach, and to haul it up when wanted. Myself, I find the ordinary G, preceded by a hiccough and followed by a sob, the nearest I can get to it. But they tell me it is not quite right, yet.

One needs to save up beforehand if one desires to spend any length of time in Holland. One talks of dear old England, but the dearest land in all the world is little Holland. The florin there is equal to the franc in France and to the shilling in England. They tell you that cigars are cheap in Holland. A cheap Dutch cigar will last you a day. It is not until you have forgotten the taste of it that you feel you ever want to smoke again. I knew a man who reckoned that he had saved hundreds of pounds by smoking Dutch cigars for a month steadily. It was years before he again ventured on tobacco.

Watching building operations in Holland brings home to you forcibly, what previously you have regarded as a meaningless formula—namely, that the country is built upon piles. A dozen feet below the level of the street one sees the labourers working in fishermen’s boots up to their knees in water, driving the great wooden blocks into the mud. Many of the older houses slope forward at such an angle that you almost fear to pass beneath them. I should be as nervous as a kitten, living in one of the upper storeys. But the Dutchman leans out of a window that is hanging above the street six feet beyond the perpendicular, and smokes contentedly.

They have a merry custom in Holland of keeping the railway time twenty minutes ahead of the town time—or is it twenty minutes behind? I never can remember when I’m there, and I am not sure now. The Dutchman himself never knows.

“You’ve plenty of time,” he says

“But the train goes at ten,” you say; “the station is a mile away, and it is now half-past nine.”

“Yes, but that means ten-twenty,” he answers, “you have nearly an hour.”

Five minutes later he taps you on the shoulder.

“My mistake, it’s twenty to ten. I was thinking it was the other way about.”

Another argues with him that his first idea was right. They work it out by scientific methods. Meanwhile you have dived into a cab. The result is always the same: you are either forty minutes too soon, or you have missed the train by twenty minutes. A Dutch platform is always crowded with women explaining volubly to their husbands either that there was not any need to have hurried, or else that the thing would have been to have started half an hour before they did, the man in both cases being, of course, to blame. The men walk up and down and swear.

The idea has been suggested that the railway time and the town time should be made to conform. The argument against the idea is that if it were carried out there would be nothing left to put the Dutchman out and worry him.

SHOULD WE SAY WHAT WE THINK, OR THINK WHAT WE SAY?

A MAD friend of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age is Make-Believe. He argues that all social intercourse is founded on make-believe. A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Bore are in the drawing-room.

“Oh, damn!” says the man.

“Hush!” says the woman. “Shut the door, Susan. How often am I to tell you never to leave the door open?”

The man creeps upstairs on tiptoe and shuts himself in his study. The woman does things before a looking-glass, waits till she feels she is sufficiently mistress of herself not to show her feelings, and then enters the drawing-room with outstretched hands and the look of one welcoming an angel’s visit. She says how delighted she is to see the Bores—how good it was of them to come. Why did they not bring more Bores with them? Where is naughty Bore junior? Why does he never come to see her now? She will have to be really angry with him. And sweet little Flossie Bore? Too young to pay calls! Nonsense. An “At Home” day is not worth having where all the Bores are not.

The Bores, who had hoped that she was out—who have only called because the etiquette book told them that they must call at least four times in the season, explain how they have been trying and trying to come.

“This afternoon,” recounts Mrs. Bore, “we were determined to come. ‘John, dear,’ I said this morning, ‘I shall go and see dear Mrs. Bounder this afternoon, no matter what happens.’”

The idea conveyed is that the Prince of Wales, on calling at the Bores, was told that he could not come in. He might call again in the evening or come some other day.

That afternoon the Bores were going to enjoy themselves in their own way; they were going to see Mrs. Bounder.

“And how is Mr. Bounder?” demands Mrs. Bore.

Mrs. Bounder remains mute for a moment, straining her ears. She can hear him creeping past the door on his way downstairs. She hears the front door softly opened and closed-to. She wakes, as from a dream. She has been thinking of the sorrow that will fall on Bounder when he returns home later and learns what he has missed.