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Updated: April 30, 2025
For hours we chugged steadily along, catching a fair tide on the lower Meuse, and sliding past the neat little towns of Dordrecht, Papendrecht, and Willemstad, through the Hollandische Diep and the Krammer Volkerak.
Bob is past-master of the art and goes it alone, without propping of any kind. He is the only man in Dordrecht, or Papendrecht, or the country round about, who can pull a boat and speak English. He says so, and I am forced not only to believe him, but to hire him. He wants it in advance, too having had some experience with "painter-man," he explains to Herr Teitsma.
There are fresh subjects to tackle some I have never seen. Athens beckons to me. The columns of the Parthenon loom up! If there are half a dozen ways of getting into Papendrecht there is only one of reaching Athens that is, if you start from Venice. Trieste first, either by rail or boat, and then aboard one of the Austrian Lloyds, and so on down the Adriatic to Patras.
The ice wind would soon blow across the Maas from Papendrecht, the tall grasses in the marshes turn pale with fright, and the lace-frost with busy fingers pattern the tiny panes, and then Johann would pack the kits one after another, and the last good-byes take place. But the sketches would remain.
Let them by special license keep the Tragfaetti intact, with their shuttles of gondolas crossing bade and forth then, perhaps, the catastrophe may be deferred for a few decades. As it was in Dort and Papendrecht so it is in Venice. Except these beastly, vile-smelling boats there is nothing new, thank God.
The deep tones of the whistle off Papendrecht sent every man to his post, the villagers standing back in amazement at the extraordinary spectacle, especially at Tine and Johann in their queer clothes, who, being instantly recognized, were plied with questions.
A country so small that they build dikes to keep the inhabitants from being spilt off the edge, is hardly the place for a scandal certainly not in stolid Dordrecht or in that fly-speck of a Papendrecht, whose dormer windows peer over the edge of the dike as if in mortal fear of another inundation.
Here's to the learned, livin' skeleton from Boston! Five per cint. man and ninety-five per cint. crank!" The next morning the group of painters all except Joplin, who was doing a head in "smears" behind the Groote Kerk a mile away were at work in the old shipyard across the Maas at Papendrecht.
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