AT 6 a. M. we, too, were passing disdainfully the still-hoisted cone. Rain descended in sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we did not happen to be in the rain, we could see rain-squalls of the most theatrical appearance in every quarter of the horizon. The gale had somewhat moderated, but not the sea; the wind, behind us, was against the tide, and considerably quarreling therewith. Now we were inclosed in walls of water, and now we were balanced on the summit of a mountain of water, and had a momentary view of many leagues of tempest. I personally had never been out in such weather in anything smaller than a mail-steamer.
Here I must deal with a distressing subject, which it would be pleasanter to ignore, but which my training in realism will not allow me to ignore. A certain shameful crime is often committed on yachts, merchantmen, and even men-of-war. It is notorious that Nelson committed this crime again and again, and that other admirals have copied his iniquity. Sailors, and particularly amateur sailors, would sooner be accused of any wickedness rather than this. Charge them with cheating at cards, ruining innocent women, defrauding the Government, and they will not blench; but charge them with this offense, and they will blush, they will recriminate, and they will lie disgracefully against all evidence; they cannot sit still under the mere suspicion of it.
As we slipped out of the harbor that morning the secret preoccupation of the owner and his friend was that circumstances might tempt them to perpetrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say that they withstood the awful temptation; but only just! If out of bravado they had attempted to eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would assuredly have been committed, but they had the sense to order the meals to be served in the cockpit, in the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter the conditions! They were saved from turpitude, and they ate heartily thrice during the day. And possibly nobody was more astonished than themselves at their success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an expert, a member of an exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course shoreward in circumstances not devoid of danger.
“What are you about?” was the affrighted question. He replied:
“I’m going to beach her. If I don’t, I shall be sick, and I won’t be sick aboard this yacht.”
Such is the astounding influence of convention, which has transformed into a crime a misfortune over which the victim has no control whatever. We did not beach the Velsa, nor were our appetites impaired. We were lucky, and merely lucky; and yet we felt as proud as though we had, by our own skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of. This is human nature.
As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the most majestic natural scenes I have ever witnessed, not a gale, but about half of a gale, was blowing. The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the tide was slack, and between Calais and Dunkirk we had it under our feet, and were able to dispense with the engine and still do six and a half knots an hour. Thenceforward the weather grew calm with extraordinary rapidity, while the barometer continuously fell. At four o’clock the wind had entirely expired, and we restarted the engine, and crawled past Westend and Nieuport, resorts very ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from the sea. By the time we sighted the whiteness of the kursaal at Ostend the water was as flat as an Inland lake.
0246
The sea took on the most delicate purple tints, and the pallor of the architecture of Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were yet a mile and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies with stings wandered out from the city to meet us.
We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at 6:10 p. m., and the skipper was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering in the basin, he leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:
“I ‘ve had a bit o’ luck this week.”
“With the engine?” I suggested, for the engine had been behaving itself lately.
“No, sir. My wife presented me with a little boy last Tuesday. I had the letter last night. I’ve been expecting it.” But he had said nothing to me before. He blushed, adding, “I should like you to do me a very great favor, sir—give me two days off soon, so that I can go to the baptism.” Strange, somehow, that a man should have to ask a favor to be present at the baptism of his own son! The skipper now has two sons. Both, I was immediately given to understand, are destined for the sea. He has six brothers-in-law, and they all follow the sea. On a voyage he will never willingly leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will rush down to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow it in two minutes and a half, and rush back. I said to him once:
“I believe you must be fond of this wheel.”
“I am, sir,” he said, and grinned.
We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and our rudder was within a foot of the street. Next to us lay the Velsa’s sister (occasion for the historic remark that “the world is very small”), a yacht well known to the skipper, of exactly the same lines as the Velsa, nearly the same size, and built within four miles of her in the same year! The next morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were equally drenched in tremendous downpours of rain, but made no complaint to each other. I had the awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon skylights open.
The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness of Ostend. Like sundry other cities, Ostend has two individualities, two souls. All that fronts the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is grandiose, cosmopolitan, insincere, taciturn, blatant, and sterile. It calls itself the finest sea-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is as factitious as a meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is Belgian, more than Belgian—Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident, simple, unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are full of little cafÉs that are full of little men and fat women. All the little streets are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum quantity of sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs drawing little carts hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars and the whistling of railway engines.
On this Sunday morning there was a band festival of some kind, upon which the pitiless rain had no effect whatever. Band after band swung past our rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some marketing to do, as the cook declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish, and we waited impatiently under umbrellas for the procession of bands to finish. It would not finish, and we therefore had to join it. All the way up the Rue de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves speak in the brazen uproar; and all the brass instruments and all the dark uniforms of the puffy instrumentalists were glittering and melting in the rain. Occasionally at the end of the street, over the sea, lightning feebly flickered against a dark cloud. At last I could turn off into a butcher’s shop, where under the eyes of a score of shopping matrons I purchased a lovely piece of beef for the nominal price of three francs seventy-five centimes, and bore it off with pride into the rain.
When we got back to the yacht with well-baptized beef and vegetal des and tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the interesting and romantic city. Asked what he was about, he replied:
“I’m going to buy a curio, sir; that’s all.” He knew the city. He had been to Ostend before in a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the country. “There’s a pretty walk over there,” he said; “but there’s nothing here,” pointing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for twenty years, and enjoying it like a child, but the deck-hand, with one soft-voiced sentence, took it off the map.
In the afternoon, winding about among the soaked cosmopolitanism of the promenade, I was ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy fashionable affectations more surely than a wet Sunday, and the promenade seemed to rank first in the forlorn tragedies of the world. I returned yet again to the yacht, and was met by the skipper with a disturbed face.
“We can’t get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n’t allowed to work on Sundays. Everything’s changed in Belgium.” The skipper was too Dutch to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was rising in him—the passion to go somewhere else.
“All right,” I said; “we ‘ll manage with mineral water, and then we ‘ll move on to Bruges.” In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than to be standing still.
But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the railway bridge would not swing for us, nor would it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our siren. Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skipper. He said that he was not supposed to swing for canal-boats.
“Canal-boat!” the skipper cried. “By what canal do you think I brought this ship across the North Sea?” He was coldly sarcastic, and his sarcasm forced the bridge open. We passed through, set our sails, and were presently heeling over and washing a wave of water up the banks of the canal. I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge, I shaved it as close as I could for the fun of the thing. Whereupon the skipper became excited, and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal, because the barges were no stronger than cigar-boxes, having sides only an inch thick, and would crumble at a touch; and the whole barge-population of Belgium and Holland, but especially Belgium, was in a conspiracy to extract damages out of yachts on the slightest pretext. It seemed to me that the skipper’s alarm was exaggerated. I understood it a few days later, when he related to me that he had once quite innocently assisted at the cracking of a cigar-box, for which his employer had had to pay five thousand francs.
0251
The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good order.
Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that summer! The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through the water, and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing than the sails. And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon of the monotonous tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little village resembles every other little village. We had to invent something to pass the time, and we were unwise enough to measure the speed of the engine on this smooth water in this unusual calm. A speed trial is nearly always an error of tact, for the reason that it shatters beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful illusion that under favorable conditions the engine would drive the yacht at the rate of twelve kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts at every hundred meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test gave seven and a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The distances must be wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious. The next test gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to the engine, and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing even that the dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of the test was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.
Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it, and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters; and by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges in the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better engine than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth in a collapse. Nevertheless the Velsa had been a most pleasing object as seen from the bank.
