GÄDDEBÄCK.
“I hung fine garments
On two wooden men
Who stand on the wall;
Heroes they seemed to be
When they were clothed;
The unclad are despisèd.”
_Hávamál._
The day had been oppressively hot, more actual heat, perhaps—reckoning
by the degrees of Reaumur or Farenheit—than had been experienced on the
fjeld of the Tellemark;—but that was dry, bracing, exhilarating heat,
such as is felt on the mountain side; this was the moist, feverish
warmth, caused by the sun’s rays acting on the wide expanse of the Wener
Sjön and its marshy shores, and secretly and imperceptibly drawing up
vapours, which would eventually fall in rain,—not, perhaps, on the spot
from which they had been raised, but on the cold distant mountains of
Fille Fjeld, which at once attracted and condensed them. There was not a
cloud in the sky, but the sun would not shine brightly or cheerily either.
The long summer’s day was, however, drawing to a close, and the party
were sitting at the extreme end of a little jetty which Moodie had built
out into the river on piles of solid fir. This was covered with an awning
of striped duck,—of little use as an awning so late in the day, for the
sun was low enough to peep under it, but still kept up, partly to tempt
the air of wind, which every now and then fluttered its vandyked border,
and partly as a preservative against the dews, which would be sure to
fall as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon.
From a flag-staff, stepped on the outermost pile, hung a huge red English
ensign, every now and then stirring in the breeze, half unrolling its
lazy folds and then dropping motionless against its staff. Moodie was
very particular about this flag, and hoisted it every morning with his
own hands,—for ever since he had fairly turned his back upon his native
land, he had become intensely national.
In the front and beneath them the broad, clear, deep, still, brimming
river, full four hundred yards from bank to bank, glided quietly along
with a calm unbroken surface, and a motion hardly sufficient to bring
a strain upon the chain cable of the little cutter that was moored
some twenty yards off the head of the pier, with her triangular burgee
fluttering out in the breeze that was not strong enough to move the
heavier ensign, and displaying the red cross and the golden R.Y.S. so
well known in every port in Europe. It was a singular thing to see it
here though, a hundred miles in the heart of Sweden, with the tremendous
Falls of Trollhättan between it and the sea.
Made fast to the rails of the jetty were half a dozen boats, of all
shapes and sizes—from the long narrow galley with its four well-scraped
ashen oars, to the little white flat-bottomed duck-punt,—for Gäddebäck,
though not, strictly speaking, an island, except during the freshets of
early summer, was so perfectly insulated by the sluggish brook and the
marshy ground through which it flowed, as to make all communication with
the main land, except by boat, extremely precarious.
Dinner had been over for some time, and the party had adjourned to the
jetty, as the coolest place they could find. They were sitting with their
wine glasses before them, while two or three bottles of light claret were
towing overboard, suspended in the cool water of the river by as many
night-lines.
“Upon my word,” said the Captain, throwing open his waistcoat, “the
West Indies is a fool to this; and it is not unlike a tropical climate
either,—moist, damp, and hot,—stewing rather than broiling.”
“To tell you the truth,” said the Parson, “I am surprised at your
selecting this spot for your residence, beautiful as it certainly is;
with all this marsh land about it, it cannot fail to be unhealthy.”
“Well, I do not know,” said Moodie, “they do talk of agues, certainly,
but these things never hurt me, and the place suits me well enough; there
is plenty of shooting—ducks and snipes without end; and on the other side
of that range of heights, not three miles from us, is a royal forest,
well preserved, in which I have full permission to kill anything I like,
except stags, elks, and perhaps peasants, though they do not make much
fuss about a man or two either; and, besides, the Ofwer Jagmästere is
a particular friend of mine. And as for fishing, it is not altogether
such as I should choose, no doubt, for it is mostly trolling,—but there
is some capital fishing, such as it is. I will show you what we can
do to-morrow at the upper rapids,—we have not been there yet. It is a
singular sort of sport, certainly; but if you are half the poacher you
used to be, you will like it for its novelty. However, the greatest
attraction that the place has in my eyes, lies in its situation: this
river is the high road from Gotheborg to Stockholm, and steamers pass it
every day. Living on this Robinson Crusoe island of mine, I can command
the best market in the country, and in fact, I do realize a very fair
income by my fish and my game. Look at my yacht, too, where else could I
put it to so great use. A short canal and a single lock passes me into
the great lake Wener, where I command some of the best rivers and some
of the best bear-country in Sweden. If I want to smell salt water again,
I have but to put my cutter in tow of the market-tug, and to steam away
to Gotheborg; and when I want to be sulky, here I am, looking after my
menagerie of Scandinavian birds and beasts, and adding odds and ends
to my museum. I dare say people wonder at the old flag ‘that braved a
thousand years, the battle and the breeze,’ as they pass backward and
forward in the steamers; but no one stops here, and you may be sure no
one would find me out by land. This is just the place for me; besides, it
is not always so hot as it is now,—I have driven my cariole across this
river, many a time.”
“By the way, what do you do with yourself in the winter?” said the
Captain; “you were never very much given to reading, and your shooting
and fishing must fail you then.”
“Fishing, yes; shooting, no,” said Moodie; “the finest bear shooting is
in the winter.”
“What! do you meet with bears in the forest?”
“Pooh, nonsense! you Englishmen are always fancying that we kick bears
out of every bush in Sweden.”
“You Englishmen!” said Birger, glancing at the flag.
“Well, well,—you Johnny Raws, I should say,—you freshmen—you griffins. I
was just as bad myself, though: I remember the day I landed at Gotheborg,
marching off with my gun over my shoulder to a little wooded valley at
the back of the town where the Gotheborg cockneys have their villas, and
attacking a Swede, dictionary in hand, with ‘Hvar er Bjornerne’—how the
scoundrel laughed.”
“Well, but what do you mean by bear shooting then,—where do you meet with
it?”
“Why, you travel a hundred miles to get a shot at a bear, and think
little of it too. The bear hunter must keep up a correspondence with
the Ofwer Jagmästerer of the different provinces, and get information
whenever the peasants have ringed a bear as they call it—that is to say,
ascertained that he is within a certain circle, and then out with the
sledge and the dogs, and the rifles, and away up the river, or across the
lake, as it may be. You do not meet with a bear at every turning, I can
assure you. I have killed a pretty many though, one way or other, since I
have been here.”
“That you have,” said the Captain,—“at least, if all those trophies that
ornament your walls are honestly come by; but by your own showing, you
cannot be hunting every day in the week; what do you do on the off-days?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I was dull enough the first winter; you
will hardly believe it, but I took to reading—I did indeed; you may
laugh, but it is quite true. I got up the natural history of the country
thoroughly, and crammed Linnæus. But I soon found something better to
do, when I began to get acquainted with the people, worthy souls that
they are. I had invitations without end, and got on capitally with
them,—quite a popular character I am.”
“The English are popular,” said the Parson, certainly; “high and low
we have found that, wherever we have been. What we English have done
to deserve it is more than I can say; but Norway and Sweden, agreeing
in nothing else, agree at all events in doing honour to the English
traveller.”
“Do not be taking the conceit out of Moodie”, said Birger; “it is evident
that he would have you to understand that it is he, the individual,—not
he, the Englishman, who is thus honoured and caressed.”
“You need not be afraid of doing that,” said the Captain; “ever since I
have known him, Moodie has been a very great man,—in his own eyes, at all
events.”
“Why, you must know I am a great man here,” said Moodie, “whatever I was
in my own country. I am a kammerjunker—no less.”
“A what?” said the Captain.
“A kammerjunker; and, in virtue of it, I have a right to go before every
one of you.”
“Well, but how came you to be a what-do-you-call-him? ‘Who gave you that
name?’ as the Catechism says.”
“Not ‘my godfathers and godmothers,’ certainly,” said Moodie, “and I
hadn’t it ‘in my baptism;’ but I will tell you how it was. Sweden, in
the winter, is as different from the same country in the summer as
Connaught from Paradise. In the winter, they are fiddling, and dancing,
and singing, from night to morn, and from morn to snowy eve. There is
not much else to do, as you say, that is the truth of it, unless one
happens to hear of a bear; so when I came to understand a little of
their lingo, I was very glad to go to their jollifications. The people
were always very civil in asking me, wherever I was—that I must say for
them. Now we, in England, don’t care much about precedence, as you know.
Most of us do not know who is first and who is last, and the rest do not
care; and those who feel most secure of their rank, are generally too
proud to take the trouble of asserting it. But it is not so here; they
all know their places, like schoolboys, and fight for them like dogs
at a feeding-trough if you happen to make a mistake about them—a thing
which the natives never do. I did not care much about this at first, no
Englishman would,—in fact, I did not understand it; but after a bit it
got to be very unpleasant—it made me a marked man. Here was I, an English
gentleman, as noble as the king—and a little more so than that Brummagem
article of theirs,—shoved down, not only by counts and barons, which I
did not like over and above; for half the people you meet with here are
counts and barons,—and precious queer ones, some of them; but, besides
this, there were their confounded orders of knighthood: there are knights
of the Cherubim and Seraphim[45], and knights of the Elephant and Castle,
and knights of the Goose and Gridiron, and Heaven knows what besides.
Then came the officials, from the prime minister down to the post-master,
and their sons and grandsons. Why, there was not a tradesman I dealt
with, hardly a beggar I gave a shilling to, who had not a clear right to
go before me—aye, and showed every disposition to exercise it, too!
“One day I was ass enough to be vexed because my tailor, who was knight
of the Shears and Cabbage, or something of the sort, elbowed his way
before me; and one of my friends, I think it was this very Bjornstjerna,
the Ofwer Jagmästere, offered to get me a settled precedence. ‘Yours
is not a new family,’ says he.—Of course it was not, everybody knew
the Moodies, of Hampshire.—Well, that was all right; I had only to
get my sixteen quarters blazoned, and he would see that I was made a
kammerjunker. Sixteen quarters! thought I. I had had a great grandfather,
that is certain, for there he lies in Havant Church, with a ton of marble
over him, and his arms on the top of that, a chevron ermine between three
mermaids ppr. to cheer him up on his road to Paradise. He was a great
man, too, and looked as if he was the son of somebody, as the Spaniards
say, to judge by the picture of his coach-and-six, and outriders with
French-horns, which is hanging up in our hall, at Havant Manor. But he
had played ‘ducks and drakes’ with his guineas, and as for his quarters,
you know we don’t greatly trouble ourselves with such matters.
“Well, I told my difficulty to one of my friends in Stockholm—an idle
young scamp of an _attaché_. ‘Why the devil don’t you write to the
Herald’s College,’ said he, ‘they will trace your descent from the
Preadamite Grants,[46] if you pay for it. Tell them to make you up a
pedigree for Sweden, and, my life for it, they will get it up well.’
“I could not lose by it, you know, so I wrote, and, sure enough, they
found out that the old family had come over with Duke Rollo, and had
a hand in that conquest of ‘Normandie,’ which your fellow Torkel is
continually dinning into our ears. They found out, too, that our name
originally was spelt ‘Modige,’ which, in old Swedish, means ‘dashing,’
and that it was a title of honour, given to us for our gallantry in the
said conquest. And, what was pat to the present purpose, Duke Rollo
had conferred on us the honour of hereditary chamberlains, as soon as
ever he had a court to appoint us to. How we came to England I forget—I
suppose, though, it was with Duke William,—and what we did there I do
not know, unless it was plundering the Saxons, like the rest; but, at
all events, I got a string of shields, fit to roof Valhalla, and a
beautiful tree—rather an expensive plant it was, though, for I paid
sixty pounds for it. However, Bjornstjerna and my friend the _attaché_
marched off with the chevron ermine and the three mermaids to the
Hof-Ofwer-Something-or-other, and brought me back a sheet of parchment
with a big seal hanging from it, giving me the privilege of pulling off
the inexpressibles of the third prince of the blood royal—whenever it
should please Providence to bless his Majesty with one,—and in virtue of
that office to style myself kammerjunker.”
“So you are a greater man than your tailor, now?”
“O yes,” said Moodie, “I take precedence of all manner of people, and
moreover wear, whenever I please—which is not very often, you may be
sure,—a concern in my button-hole, something like what I used to wear
when I was Noble Grand of the Julius Cæsar Lodge of Oddfellows, at South
Marden. You may depend upon it I am something very great indeed, though I
must admit I do not know exactly what.”
“Very great indeed!” said Birger, who, as may be supposed, did not
feel his country particularly flattered by Moodie’s absurd—not to say
ungrateful—description of his honours, and retorted with a bit of Swedish
slang: “I am sure you are something ending in ‘ral,’ as the Karing’s wife
said to her husband; it certainly is not admiral—perhaps it is corporal?”
“Upon my word, Birger, I beg your pardon,” said Moodie, in some
confusion. “You speak English so perfectly, and look so like an
Englishman, that I forgot we are not all countrymen together.”
“Well, well,” said Birger, good humouredly, “I must confess there is a
great deal too much of truth in your satire, and that is what makes the
sting of it.”
“Never mind him, Birger,” said the Parson; “you Swedes are uncommon fine
fellows, and carry your honours in your history; I should like to know
what Europe would have done in the thirty years war, if it had not been
for Gustaf Adolph and Oxenstjerna? Why, it was you who thrashed Czar
Peter and all the Russias into something like civilization, and were the
making of his armies by licking them. Gallantly, too, did you hold your
own, under the other Gustaf, against the giant you had made; and I have
no doubt but that you would have thrashed the French giant Nap., as well
as the Russian giant Peter, if you had only made up your minds in time
which side you meant to fight on. But for all that, it is a fact, as
Moodie says, that, like the girls, you are a little too fond of ribbons.”
“It is very true,” said Birger; “we depreciate our own honours by our
over-lavish distribution of them. That which is plentiful, is cheap—that
which is little, valued. It is the law of nature, and as true of stars
and ribbons as it is of green peas and early potatoes.”
“To be sure it is,” said the Captain; “what regiment in our service cares
a button for the distinction of ‘Royal,’ which it shares with the Royal
African condemned corps? Who prizes the Waterloo medal, which places in
the same category the Englishman who fought and the Belgian who ran?”
“Yes,” said Moodie, who had by this time done blushing at his blunder,
“at the Congress of Vienna, Lord Castlereagh sat among the starry host of
plenipotentiaries in a plain blue coat, without one solitary decoration.
‘Ma foi! c’est bien distingué,’ said good Bishop Talleyrand, who himself
had a star for every oath he had broken, and whose tailor could not find
room on his coat for all of them!”
“It was ‘distingué,’” said the Captain; “he belonged to a country whose
citizens do their duty for their duty’s sake. That is distinction enough
for any man.”
“Yes,” said Birger, “_if they do_—but a good deal depends on that little
particle;—however, even if citizens could be got, whenever wanted, to do
their duty for their duty’s sake, which I doubt; distinctions, which of
course involve precedence, are useful in themselves. In your country,
people are always jealously guarding their position in society; you are
always on the look out, lest some interloper should thrust you out, or
refuse you the honour you consider your due. This is what makes you
Englishmen so unsociable and exclusive; you are always on guard, walking
sentry over your own honour. Now look at our people—our barons and our
tradesmen, our princes and our farmers, all meet together without fear of
losing caste, because every one has his position secured to him, beyond
the possibility of invasion. You dare not do this.”
“Do not say, ‘you,’” broke in the Captain, “I, thank God! am a gentleman
born, and have not to work for my daily dignity.”
“That is only another instance of what I assert—‘a gentleman born!’ you
can afford to do what we all do, because, by birth or by accident, you
find yourself in the very position in which we Swedes are all placed by
the customs of our country.”
“That is all very true,” said the Parson; “for the amenities of life,
I grant your system is by far the best; men live happier and more
contentedly under it; and it certainly does produce a much more genial
and social intercourse among all classes, that men are dependent for
their dignity on something else than their wine merchant and their
pastry-cook. Still, yours is not the condition of progress; your people
live content, perhaps happy, in their fixed position; but every man of
ours, who is working for his daily dignity, as the Captain calls it,
is, in a very unpleasant and uncomfortable manner, pressing onward and
improving his own condition. Now, that nation in which every man is
continually excited to improve his condition, is nationally progressive;
that, in which every man is content in his own place, is nationally
stationary. I do not say which is the best principle, only, there is
something to be said on the other side. One thing is certain, our
principle is not the same as yours; and it is excusable, when we do
borrow from the continent, if we make a generous blunder in a science
which we do not understand, and in the largeness of our heart, give
medals to runaway Belgians, without remembering that the honour of
the medal lies not in the silver, but in the action which the silver
commemorates, and that, in truth, what we have given to the cowards who
ran, we must have filched from the brave fellows who had earned for that
medal its value.”
“So far, at all events, you are right,” said Birger, “that your nation
does not understand the science of decorations any more than ours. You
helped to spoil your own Waterloo medal much more than ever the Belgians
spoiled it, and that not altogether from your largeness of heart. If I
had been a pink-faced ensign of that day, I should have been ashamed to
wear my medal in the presence of a Peninsular veteran, who had done five
hundred times as much as I. It was a better feeling than that of being
ranked with the Belgians that made your people shy of their Waterloo
medals. And now that you begin to distribute your decorations, you do
not know how to do it: first of all you give it for any little trumpery
affair, like sticking those Chinese pigs, and then you give it to all who
have seen the smoke of the gunpowder.”
“We presume that every one present does his duty, and that none can do
more,” said the Captain.
“A very pretty poetical fiction,” said Birger, “pity that it is a
fiction. However, one thing is certain—that will never be prized that is
shared by all alike; you see that at once in our case—it is equally true
in you own.”
Just then the Stockholm steamer, _Daniel Thunberg_, hove in sight, with
her light blue pennant of smoke, so unlike the black volumes that roll
from the chimneys of coal-burning Englishmen.
“They have got something on board for us,” said Moodie; “that calico
concern on her foremast is their best Swedish imitation of our English
jack, and they always hoist it whenever they have got a letter or
parcel for me. There goes a gun; those rascals are always glad of any
opportunity for making a bang. Hallo, there! Nils!” continued he, in
Swedish, to the master of his yacht, who had gone to sleep against the
heel of the bowsprit, with his pipe in his mouth; “answer that signal,
and send a boat on board the steamer.”
He spoke as if he had a frigate’s crew at his command. Nils started
up, and as he happened, at that moment at least, to be the captain and
the whole ship’s company in his own person, he proceeded to obey both
orders personally—in a few minutes was alongside the gay little craft,
and returned with a letter, the writer of which, to judge from the
superscription he placed upon it, must have considered Moodie a very
great man indeed, so many titles did he prefix to his name—High-born and
Illustrious were the very least of them.
Moodie, a little afraid of the Captain’s satire—though the direction,
after all, was nothing more than the ordinary Swedish form in which
one gentleman addresses another, and quite as appropriate as our much
mis-used esquire,—crumpled up the envelope in great haste.
“Hurrah!” said he, flourishing the letter over his head, “this is the
very thing for us—you are in high luck; look here.”
“What is it?” said the Captain, for the letter, which was in Swedish and
written in the Swedish character, might as well have been Cyrillic or
Uncial, for anything he could make out of it.
“Why, there is to be a skal in Wermeland, next Tuesday; a grand bear
hunt, in which they drive twenty or thirty miles of country; this letter
is from the very man I have been speaking of—Bjornstjerna, the Ofwer
Jagmästere, and my own particular friend. Some half dozen respectable
farmers have made oath to him that they have been annoyed by bears, and
he tells me he has written to the præster of the neighbourhood, to give
notice from their pulpits, and to turn out the whole country. That is the
legal form on such occasions, and there is a heavy fine for any man who
does not obey it.”
“Hurrah!” said the Captain, in his turn, “then we shall kill a bear at
last.”
“That you will,” said Moodie; “Bjornstjerna knows his business as well
as any man in Sweden; there are people who fancy his patronymic a
nick-name[47] of his own earning. He would not be turning out the country
for nothing, you may depend on it.”
“Where is this to take place?”
“Why, in Upper Wermeland, as I told you, near Lysvic, not very far from
the banks of the Klara, a river I know well, as full of grayling as it
can hold; not that that has much to do with bear hunting. It is not above
a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles from this.”
“Quite in the neighbourhood,” said the Captain, laughing.
“O that is nothing, we never mind a hundred miles or so. If we get
anything like a breeze, we will run across the Wener, in the yacht, we
can send the carioles on by land to Amal, and we will pick up a waggon,
or something, for the men, at there or at Carlstad; and then you will
see how we will rattle up the country. We must send a boat, though, to
Wenersborg this very night, and tell the post-master to make out a forbud
for us; it will not do to trust to chance on such an occasion as this,
for we shall have to collect a good many horses at every station. Let me
see, we shall want one for each of us, and three for the waggon, that
will make seven; and I suppose they will charge half a horse more besides
the forbud; for we shall have four men with us, and we must take things
enough to make us comfortable, for I dare say we shall have a week in
the forest, one way or the other. Come, finish that bottle, and we will
go in and have some coffee; it is not so well to stay out here at night
when that blue mist is hanging on the swamp; besides, these rascally
musquitoes are anything but pleasant.”