Dear Theo (Ch 1.2)

Ramsgate, April, 1876

The leave-taking from home on Good Friday I shall never forget. In the morning we went to church at the Hoeve, and received Communion, and Father's text was, 'Arise, let us go hence.' And in the afternoon we did arise and from the carriage window I saw Father and the little brother standing on the road looking after the train. The last thing I saw of Holland was a little grey church spire.

Next morning, in the train from Harwich to London it was beautiful to see at dawn the black fields and green meadows with sheep and lambs, here and there a thorn bush and a few large oak trees with dark twigs and grey moss-grown trunks. The glimmering blue sky with still a few stars, and a bank of grey clouds at the horizon. Before sunrise even I heard the lark.

Arrived in London, the train started for Ramsgate two hours later. That is still about four and a half hours by train. It is a beautiful road; at the foot the hills are covered with scanty grass and at the top with oak woods. That reminded me of our dunes. We also passed Canterbury, a city with many medieval buildings, especially a beautiful cathedral, surrounded by old elm trees. I had often seen pictures representing it.

You can imagine that I was looking out of the window for Ramsgate a long time before we got there.

At one o'clock I arrived at Mr. Stokes's. The house stands on a square (all the houses around it are the same) that is often the case here. In the middle of the square is a large lawn, shut off by iron railings and surrounded by lilac bushes, in the recreation hour the boys play there. The house where I lodge is in the same square.

There are twenty-four boys from ten to fourteen years. So the school is not large. The dining-room window looks out on the sea. After dinner we took a walk. The houses on the shore are generally built in simple Gothic style of yellow stone, and have gardens full of cedars and other dark evergreens. There is a harbor full of ships, shut in between stone dykes, where one can walk.

Yesterday everything was grey. In the evening we went with the boys to church. At eight o'clock the boys go to bed and they rise at six. A curious place is the room with the rotten floor where are six washing-basins in which they have to wash themselves; and where a dim light flows through the window with its broken panes on the washing-stand, this is a rather melancholy sight. There is another assistant teacher of seventeen years. He, four boys, and myself sleep in a house near-by, where I have a little room that is waiting for some prints on the wall.

We often go to the beach. This morning I helped the boys make a fortress of sand, as we did in the garden of Zundert. I teach them elementary French; one boy has started German, and then other things -- sums, for instance. I hear their lessons and give dictation. So for the present it is not difficult; of course after school hours I have to keep an eye on them, and on Saturday night I help six of the young gentlemen take a bath. I also try to make them read; I have some books that are well suited for the boys, as 'The Wide, Wide World.'

These are really very happy days I spend here, but still it is a happiness and quiet which I do not quite trust. Man is not easily content: now he finds things too easy and then again he is not contented enough.

And now today is your birthday. My best wishes for this day, may our mutual love increase with the years. I am so glad that we have so many things in common, not only memories of childhood, but also that you are working in the same house in which I was till now, and know so many people and places which I know also, and that you have so much love for nature and art.

Did I tell you about the storm I saw lately? The sea was yellowish especially near the shore; at the horizon a streak of light and above it the immense dark grey clouds from which the rain poured down in slanting streaks. in the distance the town that suggested one of the towns that Albrecht Dürer used to etch; a town with its turrets, mills, slate roofs, and houses built in Gothic style.

That same night I looked from the window of my room on the roofs of the houses that can be seen from there, and on the tops of the elm trees, dark against the night sky. Over those roofs, one single star, but a beautiful, large friendly one. None of us will ever forget that view.

I have made a little drawing of the view from the window of the school, through which the boys wave good-bye to their parents after a visit. It is rather melancholy. They have so little else except their meals to look forward to and to help them pass their days.

Mr. Stokes says that he decidedly cannot give me any salary because he can get teachers enough for just board and lodging, and that is true. But will it be possible for me to continue in this way?

I am afraid not. It will be decided soon enough.

The time may come when I shall look back with a certain melancholy on the 'fleshpots of Egypt' connected with other situations; that is to say, the bigger salaries and the higher esteem from the world ... this I foresee.

But, boy, however this may be, one thing I can assure you, that these few months have bound me strongly to the sphere that extends from schoolmaster to clergyman, as much by the pleasures connected with those professions as by the thorns that have pricked me. It is very doubtful whether I shall make great progress in either of these professions; whether the six years spent in the house of Messrs. Goupil and Company, during which time I ought to have prepared myself for this situation, will not remain a great obstacle to me.

There is such a longing for religion among the people in the large cities. Many a labourer in a factory or shop has had a pious childhood. But city life sometimes takes away the 'early dew of morning.' Still the longing for the 'old, old story' remains; whatever is in the bottom of the hears, stays there. I am so fond of that 'Tell me the old, old story.' I heard it for the first time in Paris one night in a little church where I often went.

George Eliot describes in one of her novels the life of factory workers who formed a small community and held their services in a chapel in Lantern Yard. There is something touching in seeing these thousands of people crowding to hear these evangelists.

I think it must be a peculiar profession to be a London missionary; one must go around among the labourers and the poor to preach the Bible, and if one has some experience, talk with them, find foreigners who are looking for work or other persons who are in difficulties and try to help them. I went two or three times to find if there was a chance of becoming one of them, as I speak several languages and have mixed, especially in Paris and London, with people of the lower class and foreigners; being a foreigner myself, it might be that I am fit for it and might become so more and more. However, one must be at least twenty-four years old, so at all events I have to wait another year.

Last Monday I started from Ramsgate to London; it is a long walk and when I left, it was very hot and it stayed so until the evening when I arrived in Canterbury. That same evening I went still a little farther, till I arrived at a few large beech and elm trees near a little pond where I rested for a while. At half-past three in the morning the birds began to sing at sight of dawn and I started again. It was fine to walk then.

In the afternoon I arrived at Chatham, where one sees in the distance between partly flooded low meadows, with elm trees here and there, the Thames full of ships; I believe it is always grey weather there. At Chatham a cart took me a few miles farther, but then the driver went into an inn, so I continued my way and arrived towards evening in the familiar suburbs of London and walked to the city along the long, long roads.

I stayed two days in London and have been running from one part to another to see different persons, among others a clergyman to whom I wrote:

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A clergyman's son who, as he has to work for his living, has no time or money to study at King's College, and besides that is a few years older than one usually enters there, would, not withstanding this, be happy to find a position, related to the Church.

My father is a clergyman in a village in Holland. I went to school when I was eleven and stayed there till I was sixteen. Then I had to choose a profession, but did not know what to choose. Through the intervention of one of my uncles, partner in the firm of Goupil and Company, Art Dealers and Publishers of Engravings, I got a situation in his business at The Hague. For three years I was employed there. From there I went to London to learn English and after two years I left London for Paris.

Compelled by various circumstances, I have left the house of Goupil and Company, and for two months I have been a teacher at the school of Mr. Stokes at Ramsgate. But as my aim is a situation in connection with the Church, I must look for something else; though I have not been educated for the Church, perhaps my travels, my experiences in different countries, of mixing with various people, poor and rich, religious and irreligious, of work of different kinds, days of manual labour and days of office work; perhaps also the speaking of different languages may partly make up for the fact that I have not studied at college. -- But the reason which I would rather give for introducing myself to you is my innate love for the Church and everything connected with it, that has slumbered now and then, but is roused again each time; and also, if I may say it, though with a feeling of great insufficiency and shortcoming: 'the love of God and man.'

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Last week I was at Hampton Court to see the beautiful gardens and also the palace and the pictures. There are among others many portraits by Holbein which are very beautiful.

It was a pleasure to see pictures again.