The Chauffeur and the Chaperon Part 38

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 d.y.k.e 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 pa.s.s; 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 d.y.k.e (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 s.h.i.+vered 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s 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 d.y.k.e that imprisons the Zuider Zee.

We had been off the d.y.k.e and skimming along an ordinary Dutch road for a while; but presently we swerved toward the right and were again on a d.y.k.e 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 pa.s.sed row upon row of wonderful carts, shaped like the cars of cla.s.sical G.o.ddesses, though no self-respecting G.o.ddess 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 s.p.a.ce there was a moving crowd, gay and s.h.i.+fting as the figures made by bits of colored gla.s.s in a kaleidoscope.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Solemn men inspecting burning globes, and bargaining with their possessors_]

We expected to create a sensation with the motor, but the cheeses were more interesting, and n.o.body 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.

We watched the weighing for a long time, until we were so hungry that we could feel no enthusiasm for anything except lunch. But as we drove through crowded streets to a hotel, it was interesting to pa.s.s warehouses where cheeses were being stored. The porters with the bright hats (worn to denote their ancient guilds) were standing on the pavement tossing up cheeses, like conjurors keeping a lot of oranges in the air. Men above, standing in open lofts, caught the golden b.a.l.l.s as they flew up, and stored them among crowds of others that seemed to illuminate the dim background like half-extinguished lanterns glowing in the dark.

We lunched at an old-fas.h.i.+oned hotel with enormous rooms; and then, as we had time, we wound through the chief streets of the Dead City, stopping now and then to study _bas-reliefs_ on ancient houses, telling of stirring events when the name of Hoorn sounded loud in the world.

There was one stone picture of many old s.h.i.+ps in commotion among impossible waves, and the description was all in one word--"Bossuzeeslag." It seemed very impressive to sit staring up at it while Mr. van Buren told how "we" whipped the Spanish s.h.i.+p "Inquisition"

after thirty hours' fighting on the sand-bank, and all the people of Hoorn a.s.sembled to look on.

After seeing the house where Graaf Bossu was kept prisoner our interest in the Hoorn of long ago was kindled to a blaze. Mr. van Buren proposed taking us to the Museum, so we all went, except poor Mr. Starr, who sat in front of the handsome building in the motor-car, on "dog duty," as he calls it.

I liked the reproduction of an old Dutch inn, and the plans of the Dead Cities as they used to be; but the paintings of determined-looking burgomasters in black with ruffles and conical hats, were pathetic. The men in their short frilled trousers and high boots, thought themselves so important, poor dears, with their piteous forefingers proudly pointing to maps and specifications, that it was sad to see them still doing it when all their plans had come to nothing long ago. We admired Hoorn as it is, but it would break their hearts if they could see it, given up to cheese, and only of importance in the cheese world.

We were not in the Museum long, but Mr. Starr had suffered tortures meanwhile, and looked ten years older when we came out. Tibe had been asleep on the floor of the _tonneau_ while we were in the market-place before lunch, so n.o.body had seen him. But, deserted by his mistress, he sat up in the car to look for her, and the pa.s.sers-by caught sight of him. Word went round that there was a strange monster, a cross between a monkey and a goblin, sitting in an automobile, and all the people of Hoorn poured into the street to see the show, just as they had poured to the harbor more than three hundred years ago when the "zeeslag" was going on.

We came out to find the car almost lost to sight in the crush; but Mr.

van Buren, who is like a great, handsome Viking, pushed the people aside, and said things to them in Dutch which made some laugh and others grumble.

To escape, we drove out of the town into toy-like suburbs, with little streets, and tiny houses on d.y.k.es, each one with its drawbridge across the stream running on either side a d.y.k.e-road. And now we seemed to be in the heart of toyland. It was like a place built by Santa Claus, to come to at Christmas time, and choose presents to fill his pack.

Aalsmeer and Broek-in-Waterland, which we had thought toy-like, were grown-up villages for grown-up people compared to this toy-world.

On we went, penetrating further into the doll-country, instead of running out of it. The brown, yellow, green, and red carts, ornamented with festoons of flowers in carved wood, which were returning from market, were the only grown-up things we saw--except the trees, and they seemed abnormally tall by way of contrast.

Mile after mile, the road to Enkhuisen led on between two lines of dolls' houses and gardens. Some must have been meant for very large dolls, but that made no difference in the toy effect, as the great farmhouses, apportioned off half for toy animals, half for farmer-dolls, were just as fantastic in design and decoration as the tiny ones.

Backgrounds of meadows, ca.n.a.ls, and windmills, I suppose there must have been, as every picture has to have its background; but backgrounds are seldom obtrusive in Holland, as Mr. Starr says; and here the two lines of toy dwellings were so astonis.h.i.+ng that we noted nothing else.

For the whole ten miles of the drive we were playing dolls. The long, straight string of houses was knotted now and then into the semblance of a village, but never was the string broken between Hoorn and Enkhuisen, and though we saw so many, each new doll-house made us laugh as if it were the first.

I tried not to laugh at the beginning, lest it might hurt Mr. van Buren's feelings; but he didn't mind, and pointed out the funniest front doors, crusted with colored flowers, like the icing on a child's birthday cake sprinkled with "hundreds of thousands." After that, I laughed as much as I liked at everything, though I was sure the people who had built the houses took them quite seriously, and admired them beyond words. You felt that each man had put his whole soul into the scheme of his house, trying to outdo his neighbors in color or originality.

There would be a house with a red-brick front for the lower story, and the upper one, including gables, done in wood painted pea-green. Then the sides of the house would be in green and white stripes, the window-frames sky-blue, the tiny sparkling panes twinkling out like diamonds set in turquoises. But these would not be the only colors to dazzle your eyes as you flashed through the tall Gothic archway of trees darkening the road. There would be a three-foot deep band of ultramarine distemper running all round a house, the trunks of the trees and the fence would be brilliantly blue, and despite a dash of scarlet here and there, as you approached you had the impression of coming to a lake of azure water.

Further on would be another house, yellow and scarlet and white, having a door like a mosaic with raised patterns of flowers in pink, blue, and purple on a background of gold or black; and the high, pointed roof, half thatched, half covered with glittering black tiles.

These roofs made the houses look as if they had bald, s.h.i.+ny foreheads, with thick hair on top, and gave the windows a curiously wise expression.

But if the homesteads (with their additions for families of horses and cows) were extraordinary, they were commonplace compared with the chicken or pigeon-houses, shaped like chateaux, or Chinese paG.o.das, wreathed with flowers.