Part 66

I think all the men would have liked the adventure, but they couldn't say that they didn't want to be of our party, and Lady MacNairne actually begged her nephew to come in the motor. She didn't confess that she was afraid for him. The reason she gave was that she couldn't take care of Tibe in the car without his help. I was sure she was anxious. Though I couldn't help being glad for his family's sake that Mr. van Buren was safe (as safe as any one can be in a motor-car) it did seem sad that Jonkheer Brederode was left to brave the danger without his friends.

All Lady MacNairne's thought was for her nephew, and so I felt it would be only kind to show the Jonkheer that some one cared about him. I begged him to let Hendrik manage the boat alone, for I said we should all be so worried, that it would spoil our drive. I supposed Nell would join with me, as Lady MacNairne did, if only enough for civility, but she wouldn't say a word. However, though she pretended to be more interested in examining the car than listening to our conversation, she was pale, with the air of having a headache.

Jonkheer Brederode was pleased, I think, to feel that some one took an interest in him; but he made light of the danger, and saw us off so merrily that I forgot to worry.

Mr. van Buren didn't want to drive; Mr. Starr doesn't know how; and as Nell said she would like to sit in front with the chauffeur, Lady MacNairne and I had the two men in the tonneau with us.

We were gay; but Nell didn't turn round once to join in our talk. She sat there beside the chauffeur, as glum as if she had lost her last friend. Perhaps she was alarmed for her boat, as she doesn't care about the Jonkheer.

Now we began to see what a Dutch dyke really is, and I could imagine men riding furiously along the high, narrow road, carrying the news to village after village that the water was rising.

There was just room on top for anything we might meet to pass; but the chauffeur drove slowly, and Mr. van Buren said there was no danger, so I wasn't afraid. There was a sense of protection in sitting next to him, he is so big and dependable. I felt he would not let anything hurt me; and once in a while he looked at me with a very nice look. I suppose he has even nicer ones for Freule Menela, though, when they are alone together. It is a pity her manner is so much against her.

Although I wasn't terrified, it was an exciting drive, running along on the high dyke (I could hardly believe it when Mr. van Buren said there were bigger ones in Zeeland), with the Zuider Zee on one side and the wide green reaches of Jonkheer Brederode's Hollow Land on the other.

I shivered to think what would happen if the hungry sea, forever gnawing at the granite pile, were to break it down and pour over the low-lying land. Many times in the past such awful things happened; what if to-day were the day for it to happen again?

I asked Mr. van Buren if he didn't wake up sometimes in the night with an attack of the horrors; but he seemed anxious to soothe me, as if he didn't want his country spoiled for me by fears.

"The corps of engineers who look after the coast defenses is the best in the world," he said.

Edam was our first town; and it was odd to see it, after nibbling its cheeses more or less all one's life, and never thinking of the place they came from. The funniest thing was that it smelled of cheese--a delicious smell that seemed a part of the town's tranquillity, just as the perfume seems part of a flower. In most of the pretty old houses with their glittering ornamental tiles, there was some sign of cheese-making; and all the people of Edam must have been busy making it, as we saw only two or three.

We stopped in a large public square, with a pattern in the colored pavement, like carpet, and the place was so quiet that the sound of the silence droned in our ears.

"And this," said Mr. van Buren, "was once one of the proudest cities of the Zuider Zee!"

"My goodness!" exclaimed Lady MacNairne, "is this little old thing another of the Dead Cities? Well, I'm sure it couldn't have been half as nice when it was alive." And down something went in her note-book.

We drove by a park, a noble church, and the loveliest cemetery I ever saw, not at all sad. I could not think of the dead there, but only of children playing and lovers strolling under the trees.

As soon as we were outside Edam we began to pass windmills quite different from any we had seen before. They were just like stout Dutch ladies, smartly dressed in green, with coats and bonnets of gray thatch and greenish veils over their faces, half hiding the big eyes which gazed alway toward the dyke that imprisons the Zuider Zee.

We had been off the dyke and skimming along an ordinary Dutch road for a while; but presently we swerved toward the right and were again on a dyke sloping toward the sea. Sailing along its level top we could see far off the embowered roofs and spires of a town which Mr. van Buren said was the once powerful city of Hoorn.

"Isn't there a Cape somewhere named after it?" asked Lady MacNairne gaily; and Mr. van Buren (answering that William Schouten, the sailor who discovered the Cape, named it after his native town) looked surprised at her ignorance.

She doesn't seem to know much about history, but she will know a great deal about Holland before we finish this trip if she goes on as she is going now.

In ten minutes we were in the suburbs; in five more we were in the Dead City itself; but it had the air of having been resurrected and being delighted to find itself alive again. We passed row upon row of wonderful carts, shaped like the cars of classical goddesses, though no self-respecting goddess would have her car painted green outside and blue or scarlet within.

"By Jove, now I know why Brederode was so keen on our getting off early and not waiting at Volendam till to-morrow for the wind to die!" exclaimed Mr. van Buren. "What a fellow he is to think of everything! This is the one and only time to find Hoorn at its best--market-day. And now you will see some nice things."

He had the chauffeur slow down the car in a fascinating street, with quaint houses leaning back or sidewise, and bearing themselves as they pleased.

"Which way for the cheese market?" Mr. van Buren asked an old man with a wreath of white fur under his chin.

He asked in Dutch, but so many Dutch words sound like caricatures of English ones that I begin to understand now. Besides, I have bought a grammar and study it in the evenings. This pleased Mr. van Buren when I told him, and he says I have made splendid progress. I've got as far as "I love, you love, he loves," and so on. I think Dutch an extremely interesting language.

The old man told us which way to go, and turning up a street we should never have thought of, we came out in a huge market-place presided over by a statue of Coen, a man who founded the Dutch dominion in the West Indies, or something which Mr. van Buren thought important.

We have often wondered where the people of the towns hide themselves; but there was no such puzzle in Hoorn. The market-place looked as if half the population of North Holland might be there. The whole of the square was covered with cheeses, large shiny cheeses, yellow as monstrous oranges. They glittered so radiantly in the sunlight that you felt they might at any instant burst out into a flame. Between the great glowing mounds little paths had been left, and along these paths walked lines of solemn men inspecting the burning globes and bargaining with their possessors; while outside the huge, cheese-paved space there was a moving crowd, gay and shifting as the figures made by bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

We expected to create a sensation with the motor, but the cheeses were more interesting, and nobody had time for more than a glance at us. Suddenly, as we sat gazing at the scene, affairs in the market-place came to some kind of crisis. A stream of men appeared, dressed in spotless white from head to foot, and wearing varnished, hard straw hats of different colors. Soon, we saw it was the hats which determined everything. The blue-hatted men walked together; the red hats formed another party; the yellow hats a third; and so on. Each corps carried large yet shallow trays suspended from their shoulders--two men to a tray--and falling upon the piles of cheeses they gathered them up with incredible quickness. Then, when the trays were loaded with a pyramid of cheeses, off rushed the men to a wonderful Weigh House which Mr. van Buren says is famous throughout all North Holland. Inside were many men, busy as bees, weighing cheeses with enormous scales. Down dropped the trays; the weight was taken, and away darted the men bearing the yellow treasures to some neighboring warehouse.