Part 47

"Of course," the Mariner assured her. "You and I used to play here together when we were children. You remember that blue boat of ours? And see, there's our house--the pink one, with the green-and-white-lozenge shutters, and the thicket of hydrangeas reflected in the water. Isn't it good to come back to our own?"

Thus he snatched her from me, just as my surprise was succeeding, and made a place for himself with her, in my toy fairyland.

"It's true! One does feel like one of the little blue people that live in a willow-pattern plate," said Phyllis, as Nell and Starr sauntered on ahead. "It's perfectly Chinese here, but so cozy; I believe you had the place made a few minutes ago, to please us, and as soon as we turn our backs it will disappear. It can't be real."

"Those men think it's real," said I. There were several, rowing along the canals in brightly painted boats, with brass milk cans, and knife-grinding apparatus, calmly unaware that they or their surroundings were out of the common. Each house on its square island having its own swing-bridge of planks, the men on the water had to push each bridge out of the way as they reached it; but the trick was done with the nose of the boat, and cost no trouble. Most of the toy bridges swung back into place when the boats passed, but the one nearest us remained open, and as we looked, walking on slowly, two tiny children returning from school, clattered toward us in wooden sabots, along the narrow dyke. Opposite the disarranged bridge they stopped, looking wistfully across at a green-and-blue house, standing in a grove of pink-and-yellow roses, shaded with ruddy copper beeches, and delicate white trees like young girls trooping to their first communion.

Evidently this was the children's home, but they found themselves shut off from it; and standing hand-in-hand, with their book-bags tossed over their shoulders, they uttered a short, wailing cry. As if in answer to an accustomed signal, a pink-cheeked girl who, of course, had been cleaning something, came to the rescue, mop in hand. She touched the bridge with her foot; the bridge swung into place; without a word the dolls crossed, and were swallowed up in a narrow, sky-blue corridor.

We wandered on, turning our heads from one side to the other, I reveling in the delight of the others. Though Aalsmeer is but a stone's throw from Amsterdam, it seems as far out of the world as if, to get to it, you had jumped off the earth into some obscurely twinkling star, where people, things, and customs were completely different from those on our planet.

If there had been only one of the queer island-houses to see, it would have been worth a journey; but each one we came to, in its double street of glass, seemed more quaint than that we left behind. Some were painted green or blue, with white rosettes, like the sugar ornaments on children's birthday cakes. Some were so curtained with roses, wistaria, or purple clematis, that it was difficult to spy out the color underneath. Some were half hidden behind tall hedges of double hollyhocks, like crisp bunches of pink and golden crepe; others had triumphal arches of crimson fuchsias; but best of all the island shows were the dwarf box-trees, cut in every imaginable shape. There were thrones, and chairs, and giant vases; harps and violins; and a menagerie of animals which seemed to have come under a spell and been turned into leafage in the act of jumping, flying, and hopping. There were lions, swans, dragons, giraffes, parrots, eagles, cats, together in a happy family of foliage; and when I told the Chaperon that the people of Aalsmeer were garden-artists, as well as market-gardeners, she insisted on stopping. Nothing would satisfy her but the Mariner must cross the bridge, knock at the door of a little red house, and buy a box-tree baby elephant, which she thought would be enchanting in a pot, as a kind of figurehead on board "Waterspin."

Nor was I allowed to remain idle. When I had helped him bargain for the leafy beast, I had to go down on my knees, roll up my sleeves, and claw water-lilies out from the canal, which they fringed in luscious clusters. This I did while men and maids in painted boats heaped with rubies piled on emeralds (which were strawberries in beds of their own leaves) laughed at me. Boat peddlers came and went, too, with stores of shining tin, or blue, brown, and green pottery that glittered in the afternoon sun. Some of them helped me, some jeered in Dutch at "these foreigners with their childish ways."

In the end I was luckier than Starr, for he had to march under the weight of his green elephant, half hidden behind it, as behind a screen, while my lilies were so popular with the ladies that not even as a favor would I have been allowed to carry one. All three, if left to themselves, would have lingered for hours, choosing which house they would live in, or watching families of ducks, or counting strewn flowers floating down the blue water as stars float down the sky.

"I believe, Nephew, that I must ask you to buy me a house in Aalsmeer to come and play dolls in," announced Aunt Fay. "Don't you suppose, Jonkheer, that one could be got cheap?--not that that need be a consideration to dear Ronny!"

"I'll find out--later," I assured her, answering a despairing look of Starr's from between the green tusks of his elephant.

"Oh, please, now," urged the gentle voice which every one but Tibe obeys; "because, you know, I'm not strong, and when I set my heart on a thing, and suffer disappointment, it makes me ill. If I were ill I should have to go home, and those darling girls couldn't finish the trip."

"You haven't had time to set your heart upon a house here," said Starr. "You only thought of it a minute ago."

"We Scotch have so much heart, dearest, that it goes out to things--and people--in less than a minute. I'm a victim to mine. It would be a pity----"

"Oh, do go to the head fairy at once, Alb, and demand a cheap house for my aunt to play dolls in," groaned Starr. "If he hasn't got one, he must build it."

"He could easily do that," said I. "Every now and then a new island is formed in this water-world, and the nearest householder seizes it, claiming it as his own, on much the same basis that Napoleon claimed the Netherlands. Then he digs it into an extra garden or strawberry bed. But he would sacrifice his vegetables if he saw a prospect of making money. It might amuse Lady MacNairne to do a little amateur market gardening, though they say slugs are unusually fat and juicy in Aalsmeer."

"Oh! Maybe I'd better wait and see a few more places before I decide, then," exclaimed the lady. "Not that I'm afraid of slugs myself, only I'm sure they wouldn't agree with Tibe. And besides, it would be dull for him in winter."

"Not at all," said I, having discovered that the one possible way of detaching the lady from a pet scheme is by advising her to cling to it. "Everybody skates then, instead of going about in boats, and no one has really seen Aalsmeer who hasn't seen it on a winter evening. Then, in front of each island, on a low square post, is set a lighted lantern. Imagine the effect of a double line of such lights all the way down the long, long canal, each calling up a ghost-light from under the blue ice."

The tyrant shivered. "It sounds lovely," she said; "but I think I will wait. Come, girls, we'd better be getting back to the boat."

"Sweet are the uses of an Albatross," I heard Starr murmur.

We turned our backs on the water fairies' domain, and went into the world again. In the long commonplace street of shops through which we had passed in coming, Aunt Fay stopped. She had torn a silk flounce on her petticoat, and would thank me to act as interpreter in buying a box of safety-pins. I made the demand, and could not see why the two girls and their chaperon had to stifle laughter when an earnest, flaxen-haired maiden began industriously to count the pins in the box.

"She says she has to do that, because they are sold by the piece," I explained; but they laughed a great deal more.

It was a pity they could not see the meer which rings in their fairyland--a meer dotted with high-standing, prim little islands, which, though made by nature, not man, have much the same effect, on a larger scale, as the clipped box-trees on show in the gardens. But to have taken "Lorelei" that way would have made it too late for a visit to Zaandam; and I thought Zaandam, despite its miles of windmills and the boasted hut of Peter the Great, not worth a separate expedition. So I turned back to Halfweg, and from there slid into a side canal which bore us toward that immense waterway cut for great ships--the North Sea Canal. There was a smell of salt in the air, and a heavy perfume from slow-going peat-boats. Gulls wheeled over "Lorelei" so low that we could have reached up and caught their dangling coral feet. A passing cloud veiled the sun with gray tissue which streaked the water with purple shadow, and freckled it with rain. Passengers on Amsterdam-bound ships that loomed above us like leviathans, stared down at our little craft and the bluff-browed barge we towed. Here we were in the full stream of sea-going traffic and commerce; and afar off a mass of towers showed where Amsterdam toiled and made merry.

But we were not yet bound for Amsterdam. Twisting northward as the details of the city were sketched upon the sky, we turned into the canal which leads to Zaandam of the self-satisfied, painted houses. There was just time for a swift run down the river, and a call at one of that famous battalion of windmills whose whirling sails fill the air with a ceaseless whirr, like the flight of birds at sunset; then a walk to the hovel where Peter the Great lived and learned to be a shipwright. But when they had seen it, the ladies would not allow it to be called by so mean a name.

"What a shame they found out who he was so soon!" said Nell. "And he had to leave this dear little bandbox to go back to a mere every-day palace. I wouldn't have been driven away by a curious crowd. I should just have marched through with my nose in the air."

"His nose wasn't of that kind," said I. "I suppose he's the earliest martyr to notoriety on record. But perhaps he had learned all he wanted to know; and I'm not sure he was sorry to go back to his palace, which, judging by all accounts, wasn't a grand one in those days. You'll see finer houses even in Amsterdam."

And an hour later she was seeing them.

Amsterdam was in full glory that evening, in the strange radiance that shines for her, as for Venice, when red wine of sunset and purple wine of night mingle together in the gold cup of the west.