Part 10

But now for the geography. From Ostend harbour to the mouth of the Scheldt is a dead flat, highly cultivated, and dotted all over with villages and farmhouses, but somewhat lower than high-water mark. The sea is kept out by an ancient and dilapidated-looking dyke, some fifty feet high, on the slopes of which flourishes a strong, reedy sort of grass, planted in tufts at regular intervals, to hold the loose soil together. The fine sand drifts up the dyke and blows over it, lying just like snow, so that if you half-close your eyes and look at it from fifty yards’ distance, you may fancy yourself on a glacier in the Oberland. Blankenberghe is an ancient fishing village, lying just under the dyke, between eight and nine miles from Ostend. When it came into the minds of the inhabitants to convert it into a watering-place they levelled the top of their dyke for some 600 yards until it is only about twenty-five feet above high-water mark. They paved the sea face with good stone, and the fine flat walk on the top, thirty yards broad, with brick, and called it the Digue, in imitation of Ostend. They built a Kursaal, three or four great hotels, and half a dozen first-class lodging-houses, opening on to the Digue, with deep verandahs in front, and they brought a single line branch of the Flanders railway from Bruges, and the deed was accomplished. There is no such a sea-walk anywhere that I can remember as Blankenberghe Digue, from which you look straight away with nothing but sea between you and the North Pole. From the Digue you descend by a flight of twenty-four steps on one side to the sands, on the other into the town, the chief of these latter flights being at the head of the Rue d’Eglise, the backbone, as it were, of the place, which runs from the railway station to the Digue. There may be 1500 inhabitants out of the season, when all the Digue hotels and lodging-houses are shut up; at present, perhaps, another 1000, coming and going, and attracted by the bathing.

Of this institution an Englishman is scarcely a fair judge, as it is conducted on a method so utterly unlike anything we have at home at present. My American friend assures me that we are 100 years behind all other nations in this matter, that the Belgians conduct it exactly as they do in the States, and that theirs is the only decent mode of bathing. It may be so. One sees such rapid changes in these days, and advanced opinions of all kinds are being caught up so quickly by even such Philistines as the English middle classes, that he is a bold man who will assert that we shall not see the notions of Brighton and Dover yield to the new ideas of Newport and Blankenberghe before long. In one respect, indeed, it is well that they should, for the machines here are convenient little rooms on wheels, with plenty of pegs, two chairs, a small tub, a looking-glass, and everything handsome about them. But the wheels are broad, and very-low; consequently you are only rolled down to the neighbourhood of the water, thinking yourself lucky if you get within five or six yards of it. Now, as the occupants of the machine on your left and right are probably sprightly and somewhat facetious young Belgian or French women, and as the beach shelves so gently that you have at least a run of fifty yards before you can get into deep enough water to swim with comfort, the root difference between Blankenberghian and English habits discloses itself to you from the first. Of course, as men, women, and children all bathe together, costumes are necessary, but those in which the men have to array themselves only make bathing a discomfort, without giving one the consciousness of being decently clad. You have handed to you with your towels a simple jersey, with arms and legs six or eight inches in length, reaching perhaps to the middle of the biceps and femoral muscles. Into this apology for a dress you insert and button yourself up (it is well for you, by the way, if one or two buttons be not missing), and then are expected to walk calmly out into the water through groups of laughing girls in jackets and loose trousers. Having threaded your way through these, and avoided a quadrille party on the one hand, and an excellent fat couple, reminding you of the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Bubb in the one-horse “chay,” who are bathing their family on the other, you address yourself to swimming. As you descended from the Digue you read, “Bathers are expressly recommended to hold themselves at least fifteen yards from the breakers by buoys designed.” You do not see any breakers, but there is a line of buoys about eighty yards out to which you contemptuously paddle, and after all find that you are scarcely out of your depth. When you have had enough you return, poor, dripping, forked mortal, to a last and severest trial. For the universal custom is to sit about on chairs amongst the machines; and on one side of your door are perhaps a couple of nursemaids chatting while their children build sand castles, on the other a matron or two working and gossiping. Now, sir, a man who has been taking the rough and the smooth of life for a good many years within half a mile of Temple Bar is not likely to be oversensitive, but I would appeal to any contributor on your staff, sir, or to yourself, whether you would be prepared to go through such an ordeal without wincing? On my return from my first swim I recognised my American cousin in his element. He was clad in a blue striped jersey,--would that I could have sprinkled it with a few stars,--and was sauntering about with the greatest coolness from group to group, enjoying the whole business, and no doubt looking forward complacently to the time when differences of sex shall be altogether ignored in the academies of the future. He threw a pitying glance at me as I skedaddled to my machine, secretly vowing to abstain from all such adventures hereafter. Since that time I have taken my dip too early for the Belgian public to be present at the ceremony, but, like the rest of the world, I daily look on, and, unlike them, wonder. As to the morality of it, I can’t say that I think the custom of promiscuous bathing as practised here seems to me either moral or immoral. Occasionally when the waves are a little rough you see couples clinging together for mutual support more than the circumstances perhaps strictly require; but there is very little of this. The whole business seemed to me not immoral, but in our conventional sense vulgar, much like “kissing in the ring,” which I have seen played by most exemplary sets of young men and women on excursions in Greenwich or Richmond Park, but which would not do in Hamilton Gardens or a May Fair drawing-room. Meanwhile, I hope that as long at least as I can enjoy the water we shall remain benighted bathers in the eyes of our American cousins and of the brave Belgians. To a man the first requisite of a really enjoyable bath is surely deep water, and the second, no clothes, for the loss of either of which no amount of damp flirtation can compensate, in the opinion at least of your contributor, who, nevertheless in these Belgian parts, while obliged to record his opinion, has perhaps a great consciousness that he may be something of an old fogey.

I suppose that a man or nation is to be congratulated about whom their neighbours have nothing to say. If so, the position of England at this time is peculiarly enviable out here. I read the _Indépendance Belge_ diligently, but under the head “Nouvelles d’Angleterre,” for which that journal retains, as it would seem, a special correspondent, I never learn anything whatever except the price of funds. We occupy an average of perhaps twelve lines in its columns, and none at all in those of the _La Vigie de la Côte_, the special production of Blankenberghe, or of the Bruges and Ostend journals.

Oh! wad some power the giftie gie us,

To see oursels as ithers see us!

Certainly a short residence at Blankenberghe should be taken in conjunction with the volume of essays on international policy by Mr. Congreve and his fellow Comtists, which I happen to have brought with me for deliberate perusal, if one wants to feel the shine taken out of one’s native land. I don’t.

Belgian Boats

Blankenberghe has one branch of native industry, and one only. From time immemorial it has been a fishing station. The local paper declares that there has been no change in the boats, the costumes, or the implements of this industry since the sixteenth century, with the exception noticed below. One can quite believe it, as far as the boats are concerned. They are very strongly built tubs, ranging from twenty to thirty tons, flat-bottomed, the same breadth of beam fore and aft, built I should think on the model of the first duck which was seen off this coast, and a most sensible model too. They have no bowsprit, but a short foremast in the bows, carrying one small sail, and a strong mainmast amidships, carrying one big sail. Each of these sails is run up by a single rope, rigged through a pulley in the top of the masts, and of other rigging there is none. The boats are all of a uniform russet-brown colour, the tint of old age, looking as if they had been once varnished, in the time, let us say, of William the Silent, and had never been touched since. There is not a scrap of paint on the whole fleet. In short, I am convinced that the local paper by no means exaggerates their antiquity. Instead of finding it hard to believe that sixteenth-century men went to sea in them, I should not be startled to hear that our first parents were the original proprietors, or at any rate that the present fleet was laid down by Japhet, when the Ark was broken up. The habits of the fleet are as quaint as their looks. There is no scrap of anchorage or shelter of any kind here, the sands lie perfectly open to the north and west, and the surf seems about as rough as it is elsewhere. But the Blankenberghe fishermen are perfectly indifferent, convinced no doubt that neither sea nor sand will do anything to hurt them or their boats, for old acquaintance’ sake. To me, accustomed to the scrambling, and shouting, and hauling up above high-water mark, the running of naked-legged boys into the water, and the energetic doings of the crew when a fishing boat comes to land at home, there is something of the comically sublime in the contrast presented by these good Flemings. As one of the old brown tubs rolls towards the shore, looking as if she scarcely had made up her mind which end to send in first, you see a man quietly pitch a small anchor over the bows, and then down come the two sails. Sometimes the anchor begins to hold before the boat grounds, but just as often she touches before the anchor bites, but nobody cares. The only notice taken is to unship the rudder and haul it aboard; then comes a wave which swings her round, and leaves her broadside to the surf. Nobody moves. Bang comes the next breaker, lifting her for a moment, and bumping her down again on the sand, her bows perhaps a trifle more to sea, but the crew only smoke and hold on. And so it goes on, bang, bump, thump, till sooner or later she swings right round and settles into her place on the sand. When she has adjusted this to her own satisfaction one of the crew just drops over the stern with another anchor on his shoulder, which he fixes in the sand, and then he and the rest leave her and walk up to the Digue, and generally on to vespers at the church, which is often three parts filled with these jolly fellows. Getting off again is much the same happy-go-lucky business. The men shoulder the anchor which is out at the stern, or, as often as not, leave it on shore with their cable coiled, ready for their return. Then they clamber into their tub, which is bumping away, held only by the anchor out at the bows. They wait for the first wave that floats them, then up go the sails, on goes the rudder, they get a haul on the anchor, and after heading one or two different ways get fairly off.

Their costume is picturesque,--thick red flannel shirts, the collars of which fold over their tightly buttoned blue jackets, and give a tidy, uniform appearance to a group of them. The old stagers still wear huge loose red knickerbockers and pilot boots, but the younger generation are degenerating into the common blue trousers and sabots, the latter almost big enough to come ashore on in case of wreck. Altogether they are the most well-to-do set of fishermen to look at that I have ever seen, though where their money comes from I cannot guess, as they seem to take little but small flounders and skate. There used to be good cod-fishing in the winter, they say, but of late years it has fallen off. The elder fishermen attribute this to the disgust of the cod at an innovation in the good old ways of fishing. Formerly two boats worked together, dragging a net with large meshes between them, but this has been of late superseded by the English bag-net system, which brings up everything small and great, and disturbs the _pâture accoutumée_ of the cod, whereupon he has emigrated.

Disastrous islanders that we are, who never touch anything, from Japan to Blankenberghe, without setting honest folk by the ears and bringing trouble! The “Corporation of Fishers,” a close and privileged body, who hold their heads very high here, are looking into the matter, and it seems likely that this destructive _chalut, d’origine Anglaise_, may yet be superseded. It remains to be seen whether the cod will come back.

We have had abominable weather here, but nothing in the shape of a storm. I confess to have been looking out for a good north-wester with much interest. Assuming that the effect as to breakers and surf would be much the same as elsewhere, one is curious to ascertain whether these fishing boats are left to bump it out on the sands. If so, and no harm comes to them, the sooner our fishermen adopt the Blankenberghe model of boat the better. I fear, however, that with all their good looks and old traditions, the seafaring folk on this coast are wanting in the splendid daring of our own ’long-shore people. On Monday night the mail packet from Ostend to Dover went out in a stiffish breeze, but nothing which ‘we should call a gale, at eight o’clock. By some curious mismanagement both her engines got out of order and came to a dead stop almost immediately. Strange to say, her anchors were down in the hold under the luggage (the boats are Belgian, not English manned), and she had a very narrow escape of drifting right on shore. Luckily the crew, managed to get up an anchor in time to prevent this catastrophe, and there she lay right off the harbour, perfectly helpless, throwing up rockets and burning blue lights for hours. Neither tug, nor lifeboat, nor pilot boat stirred, and she rode at anchor till morning, when the wind went down. I venture to think that such a case is unheard of on our coasts. It occurs to one to ask whether there is such an official as a harbourmaster at the port of Ostend, and if so, what his duties are. There were sailors enough in harbour to have manned fifty lifeboats, for the Ostend fishing fleet of 200 boats had come back from their three months’ cruise on that very afternoon. The contingency of riding out a stormy night in a mail packet within a few hundred yards of a lee shore, in front of a great port full of seamen, is scarcely one of those on which we holiday folk reckon when we book ourselves for the Continent.

Coming out on the Digue one night, soon after my arrival, I was brought to a stand-still by the appearance of the sea. It was low water, so that I was about 200 yards off, and at first I could scarcely believe my eyes, which seemed to tell me that every breaker was a flood of pale fire. I went down close to the water to confirm or disenchant myself, and found it more beautiful the nearer I got. Of course one has seen the ordinary phosphorescence of the sea in a hundred places, but this was quite a different affair. The sand under one’s feet even was molten silver. The scientific doctor says it is simply the effect of the constant presence on this coast of great numbers of an animalcule which can only be seen through a microscope, called the _Noctiluca miliaris_. It looked on that evening as if huge fiery serpents were constantly rising and dashing along. People here say that they have it always, but this is certainly not so. On several other evenings the breaking waves were slightly luminous, but scarcely enough to attract attention. If you could only make sure of seeing sea and shore ablaze as it was on that particular night, you ought at once, sir, to pack traps and off, notwithstanding these abominably high winds. I cannot help thinking that, besides a monster gathering--probably a Reform League meeting--of the Noctiluca miliaris, there must have been something very unusual in the atmosphere on that particular night. It was a kind of “eldritch” night, in which you felt as if you had got into the atmosphere of Tennyson’s _Morte d’Arthur_, and a great hand might come up out of the water without giving you a start. There was light right up in the sky above one’s head, a succession of half luminous rain clouds were drifting rapidly across at a very low elevation from the northwest, not fifty yards high, as it seemed, while the smoke of my cigar floated away slowly almost in the opposite direction. Luckily, sir, my American friend was with me on the night in question, to whom I can appeal as to the truth of my facts, and we had had nothing but one bottle of very moderately strong _vin ordinaire_ at the _table d’hote_. If your scientific readers say that the thing is impossible, I can only answer that so it was.

Parson Wilbur, when he is considering the question whether the ability to express ourselves in articulate language has been productive of more good than evil, esteems his own ignorance of all tongues except Yankee and the dead languages as “a kind of martello tower, in which I am safe from the furious bombardments of foreign garrulity.” There is something comforting and fascinating in this doctrine, but still on the whole it is decidedly disagreeable to be reduced to signs for purposes of intercourse, as is generally the case here. Not one soul in a hundred can speak French. Their talk sounds like a sewing machine, with an occasional word of English interspersed in the clicking. I am told that if you will only talk broad Durham or Yorkshire they will understand you, but I do not believe it, as the sounds are quite unlike. The names of these people are wonderful. For instance, those on the bathing machines just opposite my hotel are, Yan Yooren, Yan Yulpen, Siska Deneve, Sandelays, and Colette Claes, abbreviated into Clotty by two English schoolboys who have lately appeared, and are the worst dressed and the best bathers of all the young folk here. They are fast friends, I see, with a young Russian, whose father, an old officer, sits near me at the _table d’hôte_. Poor old boy! I never saw a man so bored, in fact he has disclosed to me that he can stand it no longer. Blankenberghe has been quite too much for him. Lest it should also prove so to your readers, I will end with his last words (though I by no means endorse his judgment of the little Flemish watering-place), “_Maintenant je n’y puis plus!_”

AMERICA

_My father in 1870 went to America for the first time. His time was so much occupied there that he could write only home letters. My mother has allowed me to make extracts from these, thinking that they serve to introduce his later letters from America, which were addressed to the _Spectator_._

_It was owing to the fact of my father’s having publicly taken the side of the North in the Civil War that his reception in the United States in 1870 was so particularly warm and hearty._

Peruvian, 6.45 p.m.

Here I am, in my officer’s cabin, a small separate hole in our little world on the water, all to myself. At this moment I look out of my porthole and see the Welsh mountains coming out against a bed of daffodil sky, for though it has been misty all day it is now a lovely clear evening. The sea is quite calm, and there is scarcely any motion in the ship. The tea-bell is ringing, so I must stop for a little, but I shall have plenty of time to tell you all that has happened as yet, as we shall be lying off Londonderry nearly all day to-morrow. The mail does not come off to us till about 5 P.M., and we shall be there about nine in the morning or thereabouts. I may perhaps run up to Derry to see the old town and the gate and walls, etc., sacred to the glorious, pious, and immortal memory of the great and good king William.

8.45 p.m.

Tea was excellent, and afterwards R------ and I went on deck, and saw the sun go down gloriously in the line of our ship’s course; we were steaming right up a great road of fire. The sea gets calmer and calmer, and, in fact, there couldn’t be less movement if we were in Greenwich reach. So now for the narrative of all my adventures since I left you at the window. The moment we got on board, there was the rush and scramble for places at the saloon table, which Harry I------ warned me about. We were on board amongst the first, but agreed not to join the scramble, taking any places that might happen to be going. There is something so ludicrously contemptible to me in seeing people eagerly and seriously struggling about such matters that I am quite unable to join in the worry. I doubt if I could even if the ship were going down, and we were all taking to the boats. It isn’t the least from any virtuous or heroic feeling, but simply from the long dwelling in the frame of mind described in a chapter in _Past and Present_. When every one had taken the seats they liked, we settled down very comfortably into two which were vacant, and which, for all I can see, are as good as any of the rest.

8 a.m., Friday.