The Ballade of a Strange Town

My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into a fixed
affection for the town of Mechlin or Malines. Our rest there
was so restful that we almost felt it as a home, and hardly
strayed out of it.

We sat day after day in the market-place, under little trees
growing in wooden tubs, and looked up at the noble converging lines
of the Cathedral tower, from which the three riders from Ghent,
in the poem, heard the bell which told them they were not too late.
But we took as much pleasure in the people, in the little boys
with open, flat Flemish faces and fur collars round their necks,
making them look like burgomasters; or the women, whose prim,
oval faces, hair strained tightly off the temples, and mouths
at once hard, meek, and humorous, exactly reproduced the late
mediaeval faces in Memling and Van Eyck.

But one afternoon, as it happened, my friend rose from under his
little tree, and pointing to a sort of toy train that was puffing smoke
in one corner of the clear square, suggested that we should go by it.
We got into the little train, which was meant really to take
the peasants and their vegetables to and fro from their fields
beyond the town, and the official came round to give us tickets.
We asked him what place we should get to if we paid fivepence.
The Belgians are not a romantic people, and he asked us (with a
lamentable mixture of Flemish coarseness and French rationalism)
where we wanted to go.

We explained that we wanted to go to fairyland, and the only
question was whether we could get there for fivepence.
At last, after a great deal of international misunderstanding
(for he spoke French in the Flemish and we in the English manner),
he told us that fivepence would take us to a place which I
have never seen written down, but which when spoken sounded
like the word "Waterloo" pronounced by an intoxicated patriot;
I think it was Waerlowe.

We clasped our hands and said it was the place we had been seeking
from boyhood, and when we had got there we descended with promptitude.

For a moment I had a horrible fear that it really was the field
of Waterloo; but I was comforted by remembering that it was
in quite a different part of Belgium. It was a cross-roads,
with one cottage at the corner, a perspective of tall trees like
Hobbema's "Avenue," and beyond only the infinite flat chess-board
of the little fields. It was the scene of peace and prosperity;
but I must confess that my friend's first action was to ask
the man when there would be another train back to Mechlin.
The man stated that there would be a train back in exactly one hour.
We walked up the avenue, and when we were nearly half an hour's
walk away it began to rain.

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