A Wanderer in Holland | Page 4

on it, they do not row for pleasure at all.

Water is their servant, never a light-hearted companion.
I can think of no more reposeful holiday than to step on board one of
these barges wedged together in a Rotterdam canal, and never lifting a
finger to alter the natural course of events--to accelerate or divert--be
earned by it to, say, Harlingen, in Friesland: between the meadows;
under the noses of the great black and white cows; past herons fishing
in the rushes; through little villages with dazzling milk-cans being
scoured on the banks, and the good-wives washing, and saturnine
smokers in black velvet slippers passing the time of day; through big
towns, by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate screen of
leaves; under low bridges crowded with children; through narrow locks;
ever moving, moving, slowly and surely, sometimes sailing, sometimes
quanting, sometimes being towed, with the wide Dutch sky overhead,
and the plovers crying in it, and the clean west wind driving the
windmills, and everything just as it was in Rembrandt's day and just as
it will be five hundred years hence.
Holland when all is said is a country of canals. It may have cities and
pictures, windmills and cows, quaint buildings, and quainter costumes,
but it is a country of canals before all. The canals set the tune. The
canals keep it deliberate and wise.
One can be in Rotterdam, or in whatever town one's travels really begin,
but a very short time without discovering that the Dutch unit--the
florin--is a very unsatisfactory servant. The dearness of Holland strikes
one continually, but it does so with peculiar force if one has crossed the
frontier from Belgium, where the unit is a franc. It is too much to say
that a sovereign in Holland is worth only twelve shillings: the case is
not quite so extreme as that; but a sovereign in Belgium is, for all
practical purposes, worth twenty-five shillings, and the contrast after
reaching Dutch soil is very striking. One has to recollect that the
spidery letter "f," which in those friendly little restaurants in the Rue
Hareng at Brussels had stood for a franc, now symbolises that far more
serious item the florin; and f. 1.50, which used to be a trifle of one and
threepence, is now half a crown.
Even in our own country, where we know something about the cost of

things, we are continually conscious of the fallacy embodied in the
statement that a sovereign is equal to twenty shillings. We know that in
theory that is so; but we know also that it is so only as long as the
sovereign remains unchanged. Change it and it is worth next to
nothing--half a sovereign and a little loose silver. But in Holland the
disparity is even more pathetic. To change a sovereign there strikes one
as the most ridiculous business transaction of one's life.
Certain things in Holland are dear beyond all understanding. At The
Hague, for example, we drank Eau d'Evian, a very popular bottled
water for which in any French restaurant one expects to pay a few
pence; and when the bill arrived this simple fluid cut such a dashing
figure in it that at first I could not recognise it at all. When I put the
matter to the landlord, he explained that the duty made it impossible for
him to charge less than f. 1.50 (or half a crown) a bottle; but I am told
that his excuse was too fanciful. None the less, half a crown was the
charge, and apparently no one objects to pay it. The Dutch, on pleasure
or eating bent, are prepared to pay anything. One would expect to get a
reasonable claret for such a figure; but not in Holland. Wine is good
there, but it is not cheap. Only in one hotel--and that in the unspoiled
north, at Groningen--did I see wine placed automatically upon the table,
as in France.
Rotterdam must have changed for the worse under modern conditions;
for it is no longer as it was in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's day. From
Rotterdam in 1716 she sent the Countess of Mar a pretty account of the
city: "All the streets are paved with broad stones, and before the
meanest artificers' doors seats of various coloured marbles, and so
neatly kept that, I will assure you, I walked all over the town yesterday,
incognita, in my slippers, without receiving one spot of dirt; and you
may see the Dutch maids washing the pavement of the street with more
application than ours do our bed-chambers. The town seems so full of
people, with such busy faces, all in motion, that I can hardly fancy that
it is not some celebrated fair; but I see it is every