Glimpses of Three Coasts Part 26

Thou lantern in the All-Father's Home, the moon with the pale torch, if you were mine, I would give it as an emerald for my beautiful hand-maiden.

Then Hilding said, "Foster son, Your love wouldn't be any good to you.

Different lots Norna gives out.

That maiden is daughter to King Bele.

To Odin hisself in the Star-place Mounts her family.

You, de son of Thorstein peasant, Must give way, because like thrives best with like."

"He have to leave because he vas poor, you see."

But Frithiof smiled: "Very easy My arm will win me king's race.

The king of the wood fall, The king of the forest fall in spite of claw and howl; His race I inherit with the Skin."

The free-born man wouldn't move, Because the world belongs to the free.

Easy, courage can reconcile fortune, And de Hope carries a king's crown.

Most n.o.ble is all Strongth. Because Thor--

"He was fader of all dem oder G.o.ds, you see."

The ancestor lives in Thrudvang, He weighs not de burden, but de wort;

"Look now, all dese be strange words."

A mighty wooer is also the Sword.

I will fight for my young bride.

If it so were, vid de G.o.d of de Tunder; Grow safe, grow happy, my white lily, Our covenant are fast as the Norna's will.

This is her translation of the last stanzas of the account of Ingeborg's marriage to Frithiof:--

In come Ingeborg in hermine sack, and bright jewels, followed of a crowd of maids like de stars wid de moon. Wid de tears in de beautiful eyes she fall to her brother's heart; but he lead the dear sister up to Frithiof's n.o.ble breast; and over the G.o.d's altar she reach-ched her hand to de childhood's friend, to her heart's beloved.

A few days before I left Christiania, Katrina had come shyly up to my table, one evening, and tossed down on it a paper, saying,--

"Dere is anoder. Dis one is for you."

On looking at it, I found it contained four stanzas of Norwegian verse, in which my name occurred often. No persuasions I could bring to bear on her would induce her to translate it. She only laughed, said she could not, and that some of my Norwegian friends must read it to me. She read it aloud in the Norwegian, and to my ignorant ear the lines had a rhythmical and musical sound. She herself was pleased with it. "It is nice song, dat song," she said; but turn it into English for me she would not. Each day, however, she asked if I had had it translated, and finding on the last day that I had not, she darted into her room, shut the door, and in the course of two hours came out, saying, "I got it part done; but dey tell you better, as I tell you."

The truth was, the tribute was so flattering, she preferred it should come to me second hand. She shrank from saying directly, in open speech, all that it had pleased her affectionate heart to say in the verses. Three of the stanzas I give exactly as she wrote them. The rest is a secret between Katrina and me.

THANKS.

The duty command me to honor You, who with me Were that kind I set her beside My parents. Like a sunbeamed picture For my look, you painted stands.

My wishes here translated With you to Colorado go.

Happy days! oh, happy memories Be with me on the life's way.

Let me still after a while find or meet You energisk. I wouldn't forget.

G.o.d, be thou a true guide For her over the big ocean; Keep away from her all torments That she happy may reach her home.

Take my thanks and my farewell As remembrance along with you home, Though a stranger I am placed And as servant for you, The heaven's best reward I pray down For all you did to me.

Good luck and honor Be with you till you die.

The last verse seems to me to sound far better in Norwegian than in English, and is it not more fitting to end the Katrina Saga in a few of her words in her own tongue?

"Modtag Takken og Farvellet Som Erindring med dem hjem, Sjont som Fremmed jeg er stillet Og som Tjener kun for dem.

Himlen's rige Lon nedbeder Jeg for Lidet og for Stort, Mrs. Jackson, Held og Haeder Folge dem til Doden's Port."

ENCYCLICALS OF A TRAVELLER.

I.

Dear People,--We had a fine send-off from Christiania. The landlord of the Scandinavie sent up to know if we would do him the honor to drive down to the steamer in his private carriage. Katrina delivered the message with exultant eyes. "You see," she said, "he likes to show dat he do not every day get such in de house." We sent word back that we should consider ourselves most honored; and so when we went downstairs, there stood a fine landau open, with bouquets lying on the seats, and a driver in livery; and the landlord himself in the doorway, and the landlord's wife, who had sent us the bouquets, Katrina said, peering from behind the curtains. When she saw Katrina pointing her out, she threw the curtains back and appeared full in view, smiling and waving her hand; we lifted up our bouquets, and waved them to her, and smiled our thanks. Katrina sprang up, with my cloak on her arm, to the coachman's seat. "I tink I go down too," she exclaimed, "I see you all safe;" and so we drove off, with as much smiling and bowing and "fare-welling" as if we had been cousins and aunts of everybody in the Scandinavie. How we did hate to leave our great corner rooms, with five windows in them, the fifth window being across the corner, which is not a right-angled corner, but like a huge bay-window! This utilization of the corner is a very noticeable feature in the streets of Christiania. In the greater part of the best houses the corner is cut off in this way; the door into the room being across the opposite corner (also cut off), thus making a six-sided room. The improvement in the street-fronts of handsome blocks of buildings made by this shape instead of the usual rectangular corner is greater than would be supposed, and the rooms made in this fashion are delightfully bright, airy, and out of the common.

I did not quite fancy sailing in a steamer named "Balder,"--one gets superst.i.tious in Norway,--but I think we had flowers enough on board to have saved us if Loki herself had wished us ill. Nothing in all Norway is more striking than the Norwegian's love of flowers. It is no exaggeration to say that one does not see a house without flowers in the window. In the better houses every window in the front, even up to the little four-paned window in the gable, has its row of flower-pots; and even in the very poorest hovels there will be at least one window flower-filled. This general love and culture of flowers makes it the most natural thing in the world for the Norwegian, when he travels, to be carrying along something in the shape of a plant. He is either taking it home or carrying it as a gift to some one he is going to visit. I have not yet been on a steamboat where I did not see at least a dozen potted plants, of one sort or another, being carefully carried along, as hand luggage, by men or women; and as for bouquets, they are almost as common as hats and bonnets. Of the potted plants, five out of seven will be green myrtles, and usually the narrow leaf. There is a reason for this,--the Norwegian bride, of the better cla.s.s, wears always a chaplet of green myrtle, and has her white veil trimmed with little knots of it from top to bottom. The chaplet is made in front somewhat after the shape of the high gilded crowns worn by the peasant brides; but at the back it is simply a narrow wreath confining the veil. After I knew this, I looked with more interest at the pots of myrtle I met everywhere, journeying about from place to place; and I observed, after this, what I had not before noticed, that every house had at least one pot of myrtle in its windows.

There were a dozen different varieties of carnations in our bouquets.

The first thing I saw as we moved off from the wharf was a shabbily dressed little girl with a big bouquet entirely of carnations, in which there must have been many more. In a few minutes a woman, still shabbier than the little girl, came down into the cabin with a great wooden box of the sort that Norwegian women carry everything in, from potatoes up to their church fineries: it is an oval box with a little peak at each end like a squirrel cage; the top, which has a hole in the middle, fits down around these peaks so tight that the box is safely lifted by this handle; and, as I say, everything that a Norwegian woman wants to carry, she puts into her _tine_ (p.r.o.nounced, "teener"). Some of them are painted in gay colors; others are left plain. Setting down the box, she opened it, and proceeded to sprinkle with water one of the most beautiful wreaths I have ever seen,--white lilies, roses, and green myrtle. I think it came from a wedding; but as she knew no English, and I no Norwegian, I could not find out. Two nights and a day she was going to carry it, however, and she sprinkled it several times a day. An hour later, when I went down into the cabin, there was a row of bouquets filling the table under the looking-gla.s.s; five pots of flowers standing on the floor, and in several staterooms whose doors were standing open I saw still more of both bouquets and plants. This is only a common ill.u.s.tration of the universal custom. It is a beautiful one, and in thorough keeping with the affectionate simplicity of the Norwegian character.

Christiania looked beautiful as we sailed away. It lies in the hollow, or rather on the sh.o.r.e rim of the fine amphitheatre of hills which makes the head of the Christiania Fjord. _Fjord_ is a much more picturesque word than _bay_; and I suppose when a bay travels up into the heart of a country scores of miles, slips under several narrow strips of land one after the other, making lakes between them, it is ent.i.tled to be called something more than plain _bay_; but I wish it had been a word easier to p.r.o.nounce. I never could say "fjord," when I read the word in America; and all that I have gained on the p.r.o.nouncing of it by coming to Norway is to become still more distinctly aware that I always p.r.o.nounce it wrong. I do not think Cadmus ever intended that _j_ should be _y_, or that one should be called on to p.r.o.nounce _f_ before it.

The Christiania Fjord has nothing of grandeur about it, like the wilder fjords on the west coast of Norway. It is smiling and gracious, with beautifully rounded and interlocking hills,--intervals of pine woods, with green meadows and fields, pretty villages and hamlets, farm-houses and country-seats, and islands unnumbered, which deceive the eye continually, seeming to be themselves the sh.o.r.e. We left Christiania at two o'clock; at that hour the light on a Norway summer day is like high noon in other parts of the world,--in fact, it's noon till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then it is afternoon till ten, and then a good, long, very light twilight to go to bed by at eleven or twelve, and if you want to get up again at three o'clock in the morning you can wake without any trouble, for it is broad daylight: all of which is funny for once or twice, or perhaps for ten times, but not for very long.

It was not till four or five o'clock that we began to see the full beauty of the fjord; then the sun had gone far enough over to cast a shadow,--soften all the forest tops on the west side, and cast shadows on the east side. The little oases of bright green farm-lands, with their cl.u.s.ters of houses, seemed to sink deeper and deeper into their dark pine-tree settings,--the fjord grew wider and wider, and was as smooth as a lake: now and then we drew up by a little village and half stopped,--it seemed no more than that,--and somebody would climb on or off the steamer by little c.o.c.kles of boats that bobbed alongside.

Sometimes we came to a full stop, and lay several minutes at a wharf, loading or unloading bags of grain. I think we took on just as many as we took off,--like a game of bean-bags between the villages. The sailors carried them off and on their backs, one set standing still in their places to lift the bags up on their comrades' backs; they lifted with a will, and then folded their arms and waited till the bag-carriers came back to be loaded up again. If I could have spoken Norwegian, I should have asked whether those sets of men took turn and turn about, or whether one set always lifted up the loads and the others lugged them,--probably the latter. That's the way it is in life; but I never saw a more striking example of it than in the picture these sailors made standing with folded arms doing nothing, waiting till their fellows came back again to be loaded down like beasts of burden. It was at "Moss" we saw this,--a pretty name for a little town with a handful of gay-colored houses, red, yellow, and white, set in green fields and woods. Women came on board here with trays of apples and pears to sell,--little wizened pears red high up on one side, like some old spinsters' cheeks in New England. Children came too, with cherries tied up in bunches of about ten to a bunch; they looked dear, but it was only a few hundredths of a quarter of a dollar that they cost. Since I have found out that a kroner is only about twenty-seven cents, and that it takes one hundred ore to make a kroner, all the things that cost only a few ore seem to me so ridiculously cheap as not to be worth talking about. These children with the cherries were all barefoot, and they were so shy that they curled and mauled their little brown toes all the time they were selling their cherries, just as children one shade less shy twist and untwist their fingers.

We left Moss by a short cut, not overland exactly, but next door to it,--through land. The first thing we knew we were sailing through a bridge right into the town, in a narrow ca.n.a.l,--we could have thrown an apple into the windows of some of the houses as we glided by; then in a few moments out we were again into the broad open fjord.

At six o'clock we went down to our first Danish supper. The "Balder"

is a Danish boat, and sailed by a Danish captain, and conducted on Danish methods; and they pleased us greatly. The ordinary Norwegian supper is a mongrel meal of n.o.body knows how many kinds of sausage, raw ham, raw smoked salmon, sardines, and all varieties of cheese. The Danish we found much better, having the addition of hot fish, and cutlets, and the delicious Danish b.u.t.ter. One good result of Denmark's lying low, she gets splendid pasturage for her cows, and makes a delicious b.u.t.ter, which brings the highest prices in the English and other markets.

When we came up from supper we found ourselves in a vast open sea; dim sh.o.r.es to be seen in the east and west,--in the east pink and gray, in the west dark with woods. The setting sun was sinking behind them, and its yellow light etched every tree-top on the clear sky. Here and there a sail gleamed in the sun, or stood out white in the farther horizon. A pink halo slowly spread around the whole outer circ.u.mference of the water; and while we were looking at this, all of a sudden we were not in an open sea at all, but in among islands again, and slowly coming to a stop between two stretches of lovely sh.o.r.e,--big solid green fields like America's on one side, and a low promontory of mossy rocks on the other. A handful of houses, with one large and conspicuous one in the centre, stood between the green fields and the sh.o.r.e. A sign was printed on this house in big letters; and as I was trying to spell it out, a polite Norwegian at my elbow said, "Shoddy factory! We make shoddy there; we call it so after the English," bowing flatteringly as if it were a compliment to the English. _Kradsuld_ is Norwegian for shoddy, and sounds worlds more respectable, I am sure.

The roof of this shoddy factory had four dormer windows in it, with their tiled roofs running up full width to the ridge-pole, which gave the roof the drollest expression of being laid in box-plaits. I wish somebody would make a series of photographs of roofs in Norway and Denmark. They are the most picturesque part of the scenery; and as for their "sky-line," it is the very poetry of etching. I thought I had seen the perfection of the beauty of irregularity in the sky-line in Edinburgh; but Edinburgh roofs are monotonous and straight in comparison with the huddling of corners and angles in Scandinavian gables and ridges and chimneys and attics. Add to this freaky and fantastic and shifting shape the beauty of color and of fine regularity of small curves in the red tile, and you have got as it were a mid-air world of beauty by itself. As I was studying out the points where these box-plaited dormer windows set into their roof, the same polite Norwegian voice said to a friend by his side, "I have read it over twenty-five ones." He p.r.o.nounced the word _read_ as for the present indicative, which made his adverbs of time at the end still droller. Really one of the great pleasures of foreign travel is the English one hears spoken; and it is a pleasure for which we no doubt render a full equivalent in turn when we try speaking in any tongue except our own. But it is hard to conceive of any intelligible English French or German being so droll as German or French English can be and yet be perfectly intelligible. Polite creatures that they all are, never to smile when we speak their language!

As the sun sank, the rosy horizon-halo gathered itself up and floated about in pink fleeces; the sky turned pale green, like the sky before dawn. Lat.i.tude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway, I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake one for the other; but it is literally true that in Norway it would be very easy to do so if you happened not to know which end of the day it was.

When we went down into our staterooms sorrow awaited us. To the eye the staterooms had been most alluring. One and all, we had exclaimed that never had we seen so fine staterooms in a Norwegian steamboat.

All the time we were undressing we eyed with complacency the two fine red sofas, on one of which we were to sleep. Strangely enough, no one of us observed the shape of the sofa, or thought to try the consistency of it. Our experiences, therefore, were nearly simultaneous, and unanimous to a degree, as we discovered afterwards on comparing notes. The first thing we did on lying down on our bed was to roll off it. Then we got up and on again, and tried to get farther back on it. As it was only about the width of a good-sized pocket-handkerchief, and rounded up in the middle, this proved to be impossible. Then we got up and tried to pull it out from the wall.

Vain! It was upholstered to the board as immovable as the stack-pipe of the boat. Then we tried once more to adjust ourselves to it.

Presently we discovered that it was not only narrow and rounding, but harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small square pillows,--one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian beds,--a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are simply child's cribs,--no more; as short as narrow, and in many instances so narrow that it is impossible to turn over quickly in them without danger. I have again and again been suddenly waked, finding myself just going over the edge. The making of them is as queer as the size. A sort of _bulkhead_ small mattress is slipped in under the head, lifting it up at an angle admirably suited to an asthmatic patient who can't breathe lying down, or to a small boy who likes to coast down-hill in his bed of a morning. The single pillow is placed on this; the short, narrow sheet flung loosely over it; blanket, ditto; coverlet, ditto--it may or may not be straight or smooth. The whole expression of the bed is as if it had been just hastily smoothed up temporarily till there should be time enough to make it. In perfect good faith I sent for a chambermaid one night, in the early days of my Norway journey, and made signs to her that I would like to have my bed made, when the poor thing had already made it to the very best of her ability, and entirely in keeping with the customs of her country.

It is very needless to say that we all were up early the next morning; and there was something ludicrous enough in the tone in which each inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we were anch.o.r.ed off the little town of Frederikssund; and here the boat lay five mortal hours, doing nothing but unloading and taking on bags of bran.

Another big steamer was lying alongside, doing the same thing. This was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,--just out of water, and no more,--like Holland. The sailors who were carrying the bags of bran wore queer pointed hoods on their heads, with long, tail-like pieces coming down behind, which made them look like elves,--at least it did for the first hour; after that they no longer looked queer. If we had gone on sh.o.r.e, we could have seen the Royal Estate of Iaegerspriis, which has belonged to kings of Denmark ever since the year 1300, and has a fine park, and a house decorated by sculptures by Wiedewelt,--a Danish sculptor of the last century,--and an old sepulchre which dates back to the stone age, and, best of all, a great old oak, called the King's Oak, which is the largest in Denmark, and dates back farther than anybody will know till it dies.

A tree is the only living thing which can keep the secret of its own age, is it not? n.o.body can tell within a hundred or two of years anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The circ.u.mference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from the ground,--a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"--the archaeological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact may prove or disprove. For myself, I don't care so much for what they ate in those days as for what they wore,--next to what they did in the way of fighting and making love. I saw the other day, in Christiania, a whole trayful of things which were taken from a burial mound opened in Norway last spring. A Viking had been buried there in his ship. The hull was entire, and I have stood in it; but not even the old blackened hull, nor the oars, stirred me so much as the ornaments he and his horses had worn,--the bosses of the shields, and queer little carved bits of iron and silver which had held the harnesses together; one exquisitely wrought horse's head, only about two inches long, which must have been a beautiful ornament wherever it was placed. If there had been a fish-bone found left from his last dinner or from the funeral feast which the relations had at his wake, I should not have cared half so much for it. But tastes differ.

An afternoon more of sailing and another awful night on the red velvet ridges, and we came to Copenhagen itself, at five of the morning. At four we had thought it must be near,--long strips of green sh.o.r.e, with trees and houses,--so flat that it looked narrow, and seemed to unroll like a ribbon as we sailed by; but when we slipped into the harbor we saw the difference,--wharves and crowds of masts and warehouses, just like any other city, and the same tiresome farce of making believe examine your luggage. I should respect customs and custom-houses more if they did as they say they will do. As it is, to smuggle seems to me the easiest thing in the world as well as the most alluring. I have never smuggled because I have never had the means necessary to do it; but I _could_ have smuggled thousands of dollars worth of goods, if I had had them, through every custom-house I have ever seen. A commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the sh.o.r.e to meet us, we having been pa.s.sed on with "recommendations" from the kindly people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better days which is so universal in his cla.s.s. One would think that the last vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only to be explained by the same morbid liking to be tantalized which makes hungry beggars stand by the hour with their noses against the outside of the panes of a pastry-cook's window,--which they all do, if they can! Spite of our flaming "recommendations," which had preceded us from our last employer, the landlord of the Scandinavie, satisfactory rooms were not awaiting us. Sara Bernhardt was in town, and every hotel was crowded with people who had come for a night or two to see and hear her. It is wonderful how much room a person of her sort can take up in a city; and if they add, as she does, the aroma of a distinct and avowed disreputability, they take up twice as much room!