Part 2 (1/2)

From my room in the small hotel de Buda, just beneath the old gray tower of St. Rombauld in this ancient town of Malines, I have listened by day and night to the music of these bells, which sounded so exquisite to me that I can still recall them. The poet has beautifully expressed the idea of the bell music of Flanders thus, ”The Wind that sweeps over her campagnas and fertile levels is full of broken melodious whispers”

(Haweis).

Certainly these chimes of bells playing thus by day and night, day in, day out, year after year, must exercise a most potent influence upon the imagination and life of the people.

The Flemish peasant is born, grows up, lives his life out, and finally is laid away to the music of these ancient bells.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Old Porte Marechale: Bruges]

When I came away from Malines and reached Antwerp, I lodged in the Place Verte, as near to the chimes as I could get. My student days being over, I found that I had a strange sense of loss, as if I had lost a dear and valued friend, for the sound of the bells had become really a part of my daily existence.

Victor Hugo, who traveled through Flanders in 1837, stopped for a time in Malines, and was so impressed with the carillon that he is said to have written there the following lines by moonlight with a diamond upon the window-pane in his room:

”J'aime le carillon dans tes cites Antiques, O vieux pays, gardien de tes moeurs domestiques, n.o.ble Flandre, ou le Nord se rechauffe engourdi Au soleil de Castille et s'accouple au Midi.

Le carillon, c'est l'heure inattendue et folle Que l'oeil croit voir, vetue en danseuse espagnole Apparaitre soudain par le trou vif et clair Que ferait, en s'ouvrant, une porte de l'air.”

It was not until the seventeenth century that Flanders began to place these wondrous collections of bells in her great towers, which seem to have been built for them. Thus came the carillons of Malines, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Louvain, and Tournai. Of these, Antwerp possessed the greatest in number, sixty-five bells. Malines came next with forty-four, then Bruges with forty, and a great bourdon or ba.s.s bell; then Tournai and Louvain with forty, and finally Ghent with thirty-nine.

In ancient times these carillons were played by hand on a keyboard, called a _clavecin_. In the belfry at Bruges, in a dusty old chamber with a leaden floor, I found a very old _clavecin_. It was simply a rude keyboard much like that of a primitive kind of organ, presenting a number of jutting handles, something like rolling pins, each of which was attached to a wire operating the hammer, in the bell chamber overhead, which strikes the rim of the bells. There was an old red, leather-covered bench before this machine on which the performer sat, and it must have been a task requiring considerable strength and agility so to smite each of these pins with his gloved fist, his knees and each of his feet (on the foot board) that the hammers above would fall on the rims of the different bells.

From my room in the old ”Panier d'or” in the market-place on many nights have I watched the tower against the dim sky, and seen the light of the ”_veilleur_,” s.h.i.+ning in the topmost window, where he keeps watch over the sleeping town, and sounds two strokes upon a small bell after each quarter is struck, to show that he is on watch. And so pa.s.sed the time in this peaceful land until that fatal day in August, 1914.

Dixmude

Dixmude

There is no longer a Grand' Place at Dixmude. Of the town, the great squat church of St. Martin, and the quaint town hall adjoining it, now not one stone remains upon another. The old mossy walls and bastion are level with the soil, and even the course of the small sluggishly flowing river Yser is changed by the ruin that chokes it.

I found it to be a melancholy, faded-out kind of place in 1910, when I last saw it. I came down from Antwerp especially to see old St.

Martin's, which enshrined a most wondrous _Jube_, or altar screen, and a chime of bells from the workshop of the Van den Gheyns. There was likewise on the Grand' Place, a fine old prison of the fourteenth century, its windows all closed with rusty iron bars, most of which were loose in the stones. I tried them, to the manifest indignation of the solitary gendarme, who saw me from a distance across the Grand' Place and hurried over to place me under arrest. I had to show him not only my pa.s.sport but my letter of credit and my sketch book before he would believe that I was what I claimed to be, a curious American, and something of an antiquary. But it was the sketch book that won him, for he told me that he had a son studying painting in Antwerp at the academy. So we smoked together on a bench over the bridge of the ”Pape Gaei” and he related the story of his life, while I made a sketch of the silent, gra.s.s-grown Grand' Place and the squat tower of old St.

Martin's, and the Town Hall beside it.

While we sat there on the bench only two people crossed the square, that same square that witnessed the entry of Charles the Fifth amid the silk-and velvet-clad n.o.bles and burghers, and the members of the great and powerful guilds, which he regarded and treated with such respect. In those days the town had a population of thirty thousand or more. On this day my friend the gendarme told me that there were about eleven hundred in the town. Of this eleven hundred I saw twelve market people, the _custode_ of the church of St. Martin; ditto that of the Town Hall; the gendarme; one baby in the arms of a crippled girl, and two gaunt cats.

The great docks to which merchantmen from all parts of the earth came in s.h.i.+ps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had now vanished, and long green gra.s.s waved in the meadows where the channel had been.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Ancient Place: Dixmude]

The ancient corporations and brotherhood, formerly of such power and renown, had likewise long since vanished, and nought remained but here and there on the silent, gra.s.s-grown streets gray, ancient palaces with barred and shuttered windows. The very names of those who once dwelt there could be found only in the musty archives in Bruges or Brussels. A small _estaminet_ across the bridge bore the sign ”In den Pape Gaei,”

and to this I fared and wrote my notes, while the crippled girl carrying the baby seated herself where she could watch me, and then lapsed into a sort of trance, with wide open eyes which evidently saw not.

In company with a large, black, savage-looking dog which traveled side-ways regarding me threateningly, I thought, and gloweringly refused my offers of friends.h.i.+p, I crossed the Grand' Place to the Hotel de Ville, or Town Hall, the door of which stood open. Inside, no living soul responded to my knock. The rooms were rather bare of furniture, many of them of n.o.ble proportions, and a few desks and chairs showed that they were used by the town officers, wherever they were.