dinner in a simple Bergen home. "The carriage that shall take you will
come at six," the hostess had said. Punctual to the hour it came;
red-cheeked Nils and the cheery little ponies. On the threshold we
were met by the host and hostess, both saying, "Welcome." As soon as
we took our seats at table a toast was offered: "Welcome to the table"
(_Welkommen tilbords_). The meal was, as we had requested, a simple
Norwegian dinner. First, a soup, with balls made of chicken: the meat
scraped fine while it is raw; then pounded to a paste with cream in a
marble mortar, the cream added drop by drop, as oil is added to salad
dressing; this, delicately seasoned, made into small round balls and
cooked in the boiling soup, had a delicious flavor, and a consistency
which baffled all our conjecture. Next came salmon, garnished with
shreds of cucumber, and with clear melted butter for sauce. Next,
chickens stuffed tight with green parsley, and boiled; with these were
brought vegetables, raspberry jam, and stewed plums, all delicious.
Next, a light omelet, baked in a low oval tin pan, in which it was
brought to the table, the pan concealed in a frame of stiff white
dimity with a broad frill embroidered in red. Cheese and many other
dishes are served in this way in Norway, adorned with petticoats, or
frills of embroidered white stuffs. With this omelet were eaten cherry
sweetmeats, with which had been cooked all the kernels from the
cracked stones, giving a rare flavor and richness to the syrup. After
this, nuts, coffee, and cordials. When the dinner was over, the host
and the hostess stood in the doorway, one on either hand; as we passed
between them, they bowed to each one, saying, "God be with you." It is
the custom of each guest to say, "_Tak fur maden_" ("Thanks for the
meal"). After dinner our hostess played for us Norwegian airs, wild
and tender, and at ten o'clock came Nils and the ponies to take us
home.
The next day the jagts came in, a sight fine enough to stir one's
blood; ten of them sailing into harbor in line, the same as they
sailed in Olaf's day,--their prows curling upward, as if they stepped
high on the waters from pride, and their single great square sail set
on their one mast doggedly across their decks, as if they could compel
winds' courses to suit them. They had been only four days running down
from Heligoland, ahead of a fierce north wind, which had not so much
as drawn breath even night or day, but blown them down flying. A rare
piece of luck for the jagts to hit such a wind as that: when the wind
faces them, they are sometimes four weeks on the way; for their one
great stolid sail amidships, which is all very well with the wind
behind it, is no kind of a sail to tack with, or to make headway on a
quartering wind. The Vikings must have had a hard time of it, often,
manoeuvring their stately craft in Mediterranean squalls, and in the
Bay of Biscay. One of these jagts bore a fine scarlet silk flag with a
yellow crown on it. It was called the king's jagt, because, a year
ago, the king had visited it, spent some time on board, and afterward
sent this flag as a gift to the captain. We hired an old boatman to
row us alongside, and clambered on board up a swinging ladder; then up
another ladder, still longer, to the top of the square mountain of
salt codfish which filled three fourths of the deck. Most of it was to
go to Spain, the skipper said,--to Spain and the Mediterranean. "It
was well for Norway that there were so many Roman Catholic Countries:"
no danger of an overstock of the fish market in Europe so long as good
Catholics keep Lent every spring and Fridays all the year round. If
the Catholics were to be converted, Norway would be plunged into
misery. One tenth of her whole population live off, if not on, fish;
the value of the fisheries is reckoned at over ten millions of dollars
a year. Not a fish goes free on the Norway coast. Even the shark has
to give up his liver for oil, from which item alone the Norwegians get
about half a million of dollars yearly. The herring, shining, silvery,
slippery fellows that they are, are the aristocrats of the Norway
waters; the cod is stupid, stays quietly at home on his banks, breeds
and multiplies, and waits to be caught year after year in the same
places. But the herring shoals are off and on, at capricious pleasure,
now here, now there, and to be watched for with unremitting vigilance.
Kings' squadrons might come to Norway with less attention than is
given to them. Flash, flash, flash, by electric telegraph from point
to point all along the Norway shore, is sent like lightning the news
of the arrival of their majesties the herring.
Our boatman rowed us across the harbor to the landing at the foot of
the market-place. Climbing the steep hill, so steep that the roadway
for vehicles zigzags five times across it between bottom and top, we
looked back. Four more of the jagts were coming in,--colors flying,
sails taut; six more were in sight, it was said, farther out in the
fjord. The harbor was crowded with masts; the gay-colored houses and
red roofs and gables of the city on the east side of the harbor stood
out in relief against the gray, stony background of the high hill to
which they cling. The jagts seem to change the atmosphere of the whole
scene, and set it three centuries back. In the sunset light, they
looked as fine and fierce as if they had just brought Sigurd home from
Jerusalem.
Another memorable Bergen day was a day at Valestrand, on the island
Osteroën. Valestrand is a farm which has been in the possession of Ole
Bull's family for several generations, and is still in the possession
of Ole Bull's eldest son. It lies two hours' sail north from
Bergen,--two hours, or four according to the number of lighters loaded
with cotton bales, wood, etc., which the steamer picks up to draw.
Steamers on Norway fjords are like country gentlemen who go into the
city every day and come out at night, always doing unexpected errands
for people along the road. No steamer captain going out from Bergen
may say how many times he will stop on his journey, or at what hour he
will reach its end: all of which is clear profit for the steamboat
company, no doubt, but is worrying to travellers; especially to those
who leave Bergen of a morning at seven, as we did, invited to
breakfast at Valestrand at nine, and do not see Osteroën's shore till
near eleven. People who were not going to Valestrand to breakfast that
day were eating breakfast on board, all around us: poor people eating
cracknels and dry bread out of baskets; well-to-do people eating
sausage, eggs, and coffee, neatly served at little tables on deck, and
all prepared in a tiny coop below-stairs, hardly big enough for one
person to turn around in. It is an enticing sight always for hungry
people to see eating going on; up to a certain point it whets
appetite, but beyond that it is both insult and injury.
The harbor of Valestrand is a tiny amphitheatre of shallow water. No
big craft can get to the shore. As the steamer comes to a stop
opposite it, the old home of Ole Bull is seen on a slope at the head
of the harbor, looking brightly out over a bower of foliage to the
southern sun. It appears to be close to the water, but, on landing,
one discovers that he is still a half hour's walk away from it. A
little pathway of mossy stones, past an old boat-house, on whose
thatched roof flowering grasses and a young birch-tree were waving,
leads up from the water to the one road on the island. Wild pansies,
white clover, and dandelions, tinkling water among ferns and mosses,
along the roadsides, made the way beautiful; low hills rose on either
side, softly wooded with firs and birches feathery as plumes; in the
meadows, peasant men and women making hay,--the women in red jackets
and white blouses, a delight to the eye. Just in front of the house
is a small, darkly shaded lake, in which there is a mysterious
floating island, which moves up and down at pleasure, changing its
moorings often.
The house is wooden, and painted of a pale flesh-color. The
architecture is of the light and fantastic order of which so much is
to be seen in Norway,--the instinctive reaction of the Norwegian
against the sharp, angular, severe lines of his rock-made, rock-bound
country; and it is vindicated by the fact that fantastic carvings,
which would look trivial and impertinent on houses in countries where
Nature herself had done more decorating, seem here pleasing and in
place. Before the house were clumps of rose-bushes in blossom, and
great circles of blazing yellow eschscholtzias. In honor of our
arrival, every room had been decorated with flowers and ferns; and
clumps of wild pansies in bloom had been set along the steps to the
porch. Ole Bull's own chamber and music-room are superb rooms,
finished in yellow pine, with rows of twisted and carved pillars, and
carved cornices and beams and panels, all done by Norwegian workmen.
Valestrand was his home for many years, abandoned only when he found
one still more beautiful on the island of Lysoen, sixteen miles
southwest of Bergen.
A Norwegian supper of trout freshly caught, and smothered in cream,
croquettes, salad, strawberries, goat's-milk cheese, with
fine-flavored gooseberry wine, served by a Norwegian maid in a
white-winged head-dress, scarlet jacket, and stomacher of gay beads,
closed our day. As we walked back to the little moss-grown wharf, we
found two peasants taking trout from the brook. Just where it dashed
foaming under a little foot-bridge, a stake-lined box trap had been
plunged deep in the water. As we were passing, the men lifted it out,
dripping, ten superb trout dashing about wildly in it, in terror and
pain; the scarlet spots on their sides shone like garnet crystals in
the sun, as the men emptied them on the ground, and killed them, one
by one, by knocking their heads against a stone with a sharp, quick
stroke, which could not have been so cruel as it looked.
On our way back to Bergen we passed several little rowboats, creeping
slowly along, loaded high with juniper boughs. They looked like
little green islands broken loose from their places and drifting out
to sea.
"For somebody's sorrow!" we said thoughtfully, as we watched them
slowly fading from sight in the distance; but we did not dream that in
so few days the green boughs would have been strewn for the burial of
the beloved musician whose home we had just left.
The day of the burial of Ole Bull is a day that will never be
forgotten in Bergen. From mothers to children and to children's
children will go down the story of the day when from every house in
Bergen Norway's flag floated at half-mast, because Ole Bull was dead,
and the streets of Bergen for two miles--all the way from the quay to
the cemetery--were strewn with green juniper boughs, for the passage
of the procession bearing his body in sad triumph to the grave. It
must have been a touching sight. Early in the morning a steamer had
gone down to Lysoen to receive the body. This steamer on entering the
Bergen Fjord was met by fifteen others, all draped in black, to act as
its convoy. As the fleet approached the harbor, guns fired from the
fort, and answered by the steamers, made peals of echoes rolling away
gloriously among the hills. The harbor was crowded with shipping from
all parts of the world; every vessel's flag was at half-mast. The quay
was covered thick with green juniper, and festoons of green draped its
whole front to the very water's edge. Every shop and place of business
was shut; the whole population of the city stood waiting, silent,
reverent, for the landing of the dead body of the artist who had loved
Norway even as well as he loved the art to which his heart and life
had been given. While the body was borne from the boat and placed in
the high catafalque, a band played national airs of his arranging.
Young girls dressed in black bore many of the trophies which had been
given to him in foreign countries. His gold crown and orders were
carried by distinguished gentlemen of Bergen. As the procession passed
slowly along, flowers were showered on the coffin, and tears were seen
on many faces, but the silence was unbroken.
At the grave, Norway's greatest orator and poet, Björnstjerne
Björnson, spoke a few words of eloquent love and admiration. The grave
was made on a commanding spot in the centre of Bergen's old cemetery,
in which interments had been forbidden for many years. This spot,
however, had been set apart more than thirty years ago, to be reserved
for the interment of some great man. It had been refused to the father
and framer of the Norwegian Constitution, Christie, whose statue
stands in Bergen, but it was offered for Ole Bull; so much more
tenderly does the world love artists than statesmen! The grave was
lined with flowers and juniper, and juniper and flowers lay
thick-strewn on the ground for a great space about. After the coffin
had been put in the grave, and the relatives had gone away, there was
paid a last tribute to Ole Bull,--a tribute more touching and of more
worth than the king's letter, the gold crown, all the orders, and the
flags of the world at half mast; meaning more love than the
pine-strewn streets of the silent city and the tears on its people's
faces,--a tribute from poor peasants, who had come in from the country
far and near, men who knew Ole Bull's music by heart, who in their
lonely, poverty-stricken huts had been proud of the man who had played
their "Gamle Norge" before the kings of the earth. These men were
there by hundreds, each bringing a green bough, or a fern, or a
flower; they waited humbly till all others had left the grave, then
crowded up, and threw in, each man, the only token he had been rich
enough to bring. The grave was filled to the brim; and it is not
irreverent to say that to Ole Bull, in heaven, there could come no
gladder memory of earth than that the last honors paid him there were
wild leaves and flowers of Norway, laid on his body by the loving
hands of Norway peasants.
FOUR DAYS WITH SANNA.
A pair of eyes too blue for gray, too gray for blue; brown hair as
dark as hair can be, being brown and not black; a face fine without
beauty, gentle but firm; a look appealing, and yet full of a certain
steadfastness, which one can see would be changed to fortitude at once
if there were need; a voice soft, low, and of a rich fulness, in which
even Norwegian _sks_ flow melodiously and broken English becomes
music,--this is a little, these are a few features, of the portrait of
Sanna, all that can be told to any one not knowing Sanna herself. And
to those who do know her it would not occur to speak of the eyes, or
the hair, or the shy, brave look: to speak of her in description would
be lost time and a half-way impertinence; she is simply "Sanna."
When she said she would go with me and show me two of the most
beautiful fjords of her country, her beloved Norway, I found no words
in which to convey my gladness. He who journeys in a foreign country
whose language he does not know is in sorrier plight for the time
being than one born a deaf-mute. Deprived all of a sudden of his two
chief channels of communication with his fellows, cut off in an hour
from all which he has been wont to gain through his ears and express
by his tongue, there is no telling his abject sense of helplessness.
The more he has been accustomed to free intercourse, exact replies,
ready compliance, and full utterance among his own people, the worse
off he feels himself now. It is ceaseless humiliation added to
perpetual discomfort. And the more novel the country, and the greater
his eagerness to understand all he sees, the greater is his misery:
the very things which, if he were not this pitiful deaf-mute, would
give him his best pleasures, are turned into his chief torments; even
evident friendliness on the part of those he meets becomes as
irritating a misery as the sound of waterfalls in the ears of
Tantalus. Nowhere in the world can this misery of unwilling dumbness
and deafness be greater, I think, than it is in Norway. The evident
good-will and readiness to talk of the Norwegian people are as
peculiarly their own as are their gay costumes and their flower-decked
houses. Their desire to meet you half-way is so great that they talk
on and on, in spite of the palpable fact that not one word of all they
say conveys any idea to your mind; and at last, when your despair has
become contagious, and they accept the situation as hopeless, they
seize your hand in both of theirs, and pressing it warmly let it fall
with a smile and a shake of the head, which speak volumes of regret
both for their own loss and for yours.
It took much planning to contrive what we could best do in the four
days which were all that we could have for our journey. The comings
and goings of steamboats on the Norway fjords, their habits in the
matter of arriving and departing, the possibilities and
impossibilities of carioles, caleches, peasant carts and horses, the
contingencies and uncertainties of beds at inns,--all these things,
taken together, make any programme of journeying, in any direction in
Norway, an aggregate of complications, risks, and hindrances enough to
deter any but the most indomitable lovers of Nature and adventure.
Long before it was decided which routes promised us most between a
Saturday afternoon and the next Wednesday night, I had abandoned all
effort to grapple understandingly with the problems, and left the
planning entirely to my wiser and more resolute companion. Each
suggestion that I made seemed to involve us in deeper perplexities.
One steamer would set off at three in the morning; another would
arrive at the same hour; a third would take us over the most beautiful
parts of a fjord in the night; on a fourth route nothing in the way of
vehicles could be procured, except the peasant's cart, a thing in
which no human being not born a Norwegian peasant can drive for half a
day without being shaken to a jelly; on a fifth we should have to wait
three days for a return boat; on another it was unsafe to go without
having received beforehand the promise of a bed, the accommodations
for travellers being so scanty. The old puzzle of the fox and the
goose and the corn is an _a b c_ in comparison with the dilemma we
were in. At last, when I thought I had finally arranged a scheme which
would enable us to see two of the finest of the fjords within our
prescribed time, a scheme which involved spending a day and a night in
the little town of Gudvangen, in the valley of Nerodal, Sanna
exclaimed, shuddering, "We cannot! we cannot! The mountains are over
us. We can sleep at Gudvangen; but a whole day? No! You shall not like
a whole day at Gudvangen. The mountains are so--" And she finished her
sentence by another shudder and a gesture of cowering, which were more
eloquent than words. So the day at Gudvangen was given up, and it was
arranged that we were to wait one day at some other point on the road,
wherever it might seem good, and upon no account come to Gudvangen for
anything more than to take the steamer away from it.
The heat of a Bergen noon is like a passing smile on a stern face. It
was cold at ten, and it will be cold again long before sunset; you
have your winter wrap on your arm, and you dare not be separated from
it, but the mid-day glares at and down on you, and makes the wrap seem
not only intolerable but incongruous. As we drove to the steamer at
twelve o'clock, with fur-trimmed wraps and heavy rugs filling the
front seat of the carriage, and our faces flushed with heat, I said,
"What an absurd amount of wraps for a midsummer journey! I have a mind
to let Nils carry back this heavy rug."
"I think you shall be very glad if you have it," remarked Sanna. "Oh!"
she exclaimed with a groan, "there is Bob."
Bob is Sanna's dog,--a small black spaniel, part setter, with a
beautiful head and eye, and a devotion to his mistress which lovers
might envy. Never, when in her presence, does he remove his eyes from
her for many minutes. He either revolves restlessly about her like an
alert scout, or lays himself down with a sentry-like expression at her
feet.
"Oh, what is to do with Bob?" she continued, gazing helplessly at me.
The rascal was bounding along the road, curvetting, and wagging his
tail, and looking up at us with an audacious leer on his handsome
face. "He did understand perfectly that he should not come," said
Sanna; hearing which, Bob hung back, behind the carriage.
"Nils must carry him back," I said. Then, relenting, seeing the look
of distress on Sanna's face, I added, "Could we not take him with us?"
"Oh, no, it must be impossible," she replied. "It is for the lambs. He
does drive them and frighten them. He must stay, but we shall have
trouble."
Fast the little Norwegian ponies clattered down to the wharf. No Bob.
As we went on board he was nowhere to be seen. Anxiously Sanna
searched for him, to give him into Nils's charge. He was not to be
found. The boat began to move. Still no Bob. We settled ourselves
comfortably; already the burdensome rug was welcome. "I really think
Bob must have missed us in the crowd," I said.
"I do not know, I do not think," replied Sanna, her face full of
perplexity. "Oh!" with a cry of dismay. "He is here!"
There he was! Abject, nearly dragging his body on the deck like a
snake, his tail between his legs, fawning, cringing, his eyes fixed on
Sanna, he crawled to her feet. Only his eyes told that he felt any
emotion except remorse; they betrayed him; their expression was the
drollest I ever saw on a dumb creature's face. It was absurd; it was
impossible, incredible, if one had not seen it; as plainly as if words
had been spoken, it avowed the whole plot, the distinct exultation in
its success. "Here I am," it said, "and I know very well that now the
steamer has begun to move you are compelled to take me with you. My
heart is nearly broken with terror and grief at the thought of your
displeasure, but all the same I can hardly contain myself for delight
at having outwitted you so completely." All this while he was
wriggling closer and closer to her feet, watching her eye, as a child
watches its mother's, for the first show of relenting. Of course we
began to laugh. At the first beginning of a smile in Sanna's eyes, he
let his tail out from between his legs, and began to flap it on the
deck; as the smile broadened, he gradually rose to his feet; and by
the time we had fairly burst into uncontrolled laughter, he was erect,
gambolling around us like a kid, and joining in the chorus of our
merriment by a series of short, sharp yelps of delight, which, being
interpreted, would doubtless have been something like, "Ha, ha! Beat
'em, and they 're not going to thrash me, and I'm booked for the whole
journey now, spite of fate! Ha, ha!" Then he stretched himself at our
feet, laid his nose out flat on the deck, and went to sleep as
composedly as if he had been on the hearth-rug at home; far more
composedly than he would had he dreamed of the experiences in store
for him.
"Poor Bob!" said Sanna. "It must be that we shall send him back by the
steamer." Poor Bob, indeed! Long before we reached our first landing,
Bob was evidently sea-sick. The beautiful water of the great Hardanger
Fjord was as smooth as an inland lake; changing from dark and
translucent green in the narrowing channels, where the bold shores
came so near together that we could count the trees, to brilliant and
sparkling blue in the wider opens. But little cared Bob for the beauty
of the water; little did it comfort him that the boat glided as gently
as is possible for a boat to move. He had never been on a boat before,
and did not know it was smooth. Piteously he roamed about, from place
to place, looking off; then he would come and stand before Sanna,
quivering in every fibre, and looking up at her with sorrowful appeal
in his eyes. His thoughts were plainly written in his countenance now,
as before; but nobody could have had the heart to laugh at him. Poor
fellow! He was not the first creature that has been bowed down by the
curse of a granted prayer.