stateroom, a vision flitted past the door: a tall and graceful figure,
in a tight, shabby black gown; a classic head, set with the grace of a
lily on a slender neck; pale brown hair, put back, braided, and wound
in a knot behind, all save a few short curls, which fell lightly
floating and waving over a low forehead; a pair of honest, merry gray
eyes, with a swift twinkle at the corners, and a sudden serious
tenderness in their depths; a straight nose, with a nostril spirited
and fine as an Arabian's; a mouth of flawless beauty, unless it might
be that the upper lip was a trifle too short, but this fault only
added to the piquancy of the face. I lifted myself on my elbow to look
at her. She was gone; and I sank back, thinking of the pictures that
the world raved over, so few short years ago, of the lovely Eugénie.
Here was a face strangely like hers, but with far more fire and
character,--a Norwegian girl, evidently poor. I was wondering if I
should see her again, and how I could manage to set Katrina on her
track, and if I could find out who she was, when, lo, there she stood
by my side, bending above me, and saying something Norwegian over and
over in a gentle voice; and Katrina behind her, saying, "This is the
lady what has care of all. She do say, 'Poor lady, poor lady, to be so
sick!' She is sorry that you are sick." I gazed at her in stupefied
wonder. This radiant creature the stewardess of a steamboat! She was
more beautiful near than at a distance. I am sure I have never seen so
beautiful a woman. And coming nearer, one could see clearly, almost as
radiant as her physical beauty, the beauty of a fine and sweet nature
shining through. Her smile was transcendent. I am not over-easy to be
stirred by women's fair looks. Seldom I see a woman's face that gives
me unalloyed pleasure. Faces are half-terrifying things to one who
studies them, such paradoxical masks are they; only one half mask, and
the other half bared secrets of a lifetime. Their mere physical
beauty, however great it may be, is so underlaid and overlaid by
tokens and traces and scars of things in which the flesh and blood of
it have played part that a fair face can rarely be more than half
fair. But here was a face with beauty such as the old Greeks put into
marble; and shining through it the honesty and innocence of an
untaught child, the good-will and content of a faithful working-girl,
and the native archness of a healthful maiden. I am not unaware that
all this must have the sound of an invention, and there being no man
to bear witness to my tale, except such as have sailed in the
Norwegian dampskib "Jupiter," it will not be much believed;
nevertheless, I shall tell it. Not being the sort of artist to bring
the girl's face away in a portfolio, the only thing left for me is to
try to set it in the poor portraiture of words. Poor enough
portraiture it is that words can fashion, even for things less subtle
than faces,--a day or a sky, a swift passion or a thought. Words seem
always to those who work with them more or less failures; but most of
all are they impotent and disappointing when a face is to be told. Yet
I shall not cast away my sketch of the beautiful Anna. It is the only
one which will ever be made of her. Now that I think of it, however,
there is one testimony to be added to mine,--a testimony of much
weight, too, taken in the connection, for it was of such
involuntariness.
On the second day of my voyage in the "Jupiter," in the course of a
conversation with the captain, I took occasion to speak of the
good-will and efficiency of his stewardess. He assented warmly to my
praise of her; adding that she was born of very poor parents, and had
little education herself beyond knowing how to read and write, but was
a person of rare goodness.
I then said, "And of very rare beauty, also. I have never seen a more
beautiful face."
"Yes," he replied; "there is something very not common about her. Her
face is quite antic." "Antique," he meant, but for the first few
seconds I could not imagine what it was he had intended. He also,
then, had recognized, as this phrase shows, the truly classic quality
of the girl's beauty; and he is the only witness I am able to bring to
prove that my description of her face and figure and look and bearing
are not an ingenious fable wrought out of nothing.
From Katrina, also, there came testimonies to Anna's rare quality.
"I have been in long speech with Anna," she said before we had been at
sea a day. "I tink she will come to Bergen, by my husband and me. She
can be trusted; I can tell in one firstest minute vat peoples is to be
trusted. She is so polite always, but she passes ghentlemens without
speaking, except she has business. I can tell."
Shrewd Katrina! Her husband has a sort of restaurant and billiard-room
in Bergen,--a place not over-creditable, I fear, although keeping
within the pale of respectability. It is a sore trial to Katrina, his
doing this, especially the selling of liquor. She had several times
refused her consent to his going into the business, "but dis time,"
she said, "he had it before I knowed anyting, don't you see? He didn't
tell me. I always tink dere is de wifes and children, and maybe de
mens don't take home no bread; and den to sit dere and drink, it is
shame, don't you see? But if he don't do, some other mans would; so
tere it is, don't you see? And tere is money in it, you see." Poor
Katrina had tried in vain to shelter herself and appease her
conscience by this old sophistry. Her pride and self-respect still so
revolted at the trade that she would not go to the place to stay. "He
not get me to go tere. He not want me, either. I would not work in
such a place."
But she had no scruples about endeavoring to engage Anna as a
waiter-girl for the place.
"She will be by my husband and me," she said, "and it is always shut
every night at ten o'clock; and my husband is very strict man. He will
have all right. She can have all her times after dat; and here she
have only four dollars a mont, and my husband gives more tan dat. And
I shall teach to her English; I gives her one hour every day. Dat is
great for her, for she vill go to America next year. If she can
English speak, she get twice the money in America. Oh, ven I go to
America, I did not know de name of one ting; and every night I cry and
cry; I tink I never learn; but dat Irish lady I live by, she vas so
kind to me as my own mother. Oh, I like Irish peoples; the Irish and
the Americans, dey are what I like best. I don't like de English; and
Chermans, I don't like dem; dey vill take all out of your pocket. She
is intended;[9] and dat is good. When one are intended one must be
careful; and if he is one you love, ten you don't vant to do anyting
else; and her sweetheart is a nice young fellow. He is in the engyne
in a Hamburg boat. She has been speaking by me about him."
The dampskib "Jupiter" is a roller. It is a marvel how anything not a
log can roll at such a rate. The stateroom berths being built across
instead of lengthwise, the result is a perpetual tossing of heads
_versus_ feet. As Katrina expressively put it, "It is first te head,
and den te feets up. Dat is te worstest. Dat makes te difference."
Ill, helpless, almost as tight-wedged in as a knife-blade shut in its
handle, I lay in my trough a day and a night. The swinging port-hole,
through which I feebly looked, made a series of ever-changing
vignettes of the bits of water, sky, land it showed: moss-crowned
hillocks of stone; now and then a red roof, or a sloop scudding by.
The shore of Norway is a kaleidoscope of land, rock, and water broken
up. To call it shore at all seems half a misnomer. I have never heard
of a census of the islands on the Norway coast, but it would be a
matter of great interest to know if it needs the decimals of millions
to reckon them. This would not be hard to be believed by one who has
sailed two days and two nights in their labyrinths. They are a more
distinctive feature in the beauty of Norway's seaward face than even
her majestic mountain ranges. They have as much and as changing beauty
of color as those, and, added to the subtle and exhaustless beauty of
changing color, they have the still subtler charm of that mysterious
combination of rest and restlessness, stillness and motion, solidity
and evanescence, which is the dower of all islands, and most of all of
the islands of outer seas. Even more than from the stern solemnity of
their mountain-walled fjords must the Norwegians have drawn their
ancient inspirations, I imagine, from the wooing, baffling, luring,
forbidding, locking and unlocking, and never-revealing vistas,
channels, gates, and barriers of their islands. They are round and
soft and mossy as hillocks of sphagnum in a green marsh. You may sink
above your ankles in the moist, delicious verdure, which looks from
the sea like a mere mantle lightly flung over the rock. Or they are
bare and gray and unbroken, as if coated in mail of stone; and you
might clutch in vain for so much as the help of a crevice or a shrub,
if you were cast on their sides. Some lie level and low, with oases of
vividest green in their hollows; these lift and loom in the noon or
the twilight, with a mirage which the desert cannot outdo. Some rise
up in precipices of sudden wall, countless Gibraltars, which no mortal
power can scale, and only wild creatures with tireless wings can
approach. They are lashed by foaming waves, and the echoes peal like
laughter among them; the tide brings them all it has; the morning sun
lights them up, top after top, like beacons of its way out to sea, and
leaves them again at night, lingeringly, one by one; changing them
often into the semblance of jewels by the last red rays of its sinking
light. They seem, as you sail swiftly among them, to be sailing too, a
flotilla of glittering kingdoms; your escort, your convoy; shifting to
right, to left, in gorgeous parade of skilful display, as for a
pageant. When you anchor, they too are of a sudden at rest; solid,
substantial land again, wooing you to take possession. There are
myriads of them still unknown, untrodden, and sure to remain so
forever, no matter how long the world may last; as sure as if the old
spells were true, and the gods had made them invincible by a charm, or
lonely under an eternal curse. At the mouths of the great fjords they
seem sometimes to have fallen back and into line, as if to do honor to
whomever might come sailing in. They must have greatly helped the
splendor of the processions of viking ships, a thousand years ago, in
the days when a viking thought nothing of setting sail for the south
or the east with six or seven hundred ships in his fleet. If their
birch-trees were as plumy then as now, there was nothing finer than
they in all that a viking adorned his ships with, not even the gilt
dragons at the prow.
Before the close of the second day of our voyage, the six passengers
in the ladies' cabin had reached the end of their journey and left the
boat. By way of atonement for his first scheming to rob me of my
stateroom, the captain now magnanimously offered to me the whole of
the ladies' cabin, for which he had no further use. How gladly I
accepted it! How gleefully I watched my broad bed being made on a
sofa, lengthwise the rolling "Jupiter"! How pleased was Katrina, how
cheery the beautiful stewardess!
"Good-night! Good-night! Sleep well! Sleep well!" they both said as
they left me.
"Now it will be different; not te head and feets any more. De oder way
is bestest," added Katrina, as she lurched out of the room.
How triumphantly I locked the door! How well I slept! All of which
would be of no consequence here, except that it makes such a
background for what followed. Out of a sleep sound as only the sleep
of one worn out by seasickness can be, I was roused by a dash of water
in my face. Too bewildered at first to understand what had happened, I
sat up in bed quickly, and thereby brought my face considerably nearer
the port-hole, directly above my pillow, just in time to receive
another full dash of water in my very teeth; and water by no means
clean, either, as I instantly perceived. The situation explained
itself. The port-hole had not been shut tight; the decks were being
washed. Swash, swash, it came, with frightful dexterity, aimed, it
would seem, at that very port-hole, and nowhere else. I sprang up,
seized the handle of the port-hole window, and tried to tighten it. In
my ignorance and fright I turned it the wrong way; in poured the dirty
water. There stood I, clapping the window to with all my might, but
utterly unable either to fasten it or to hold it tight enough to keep
out the water. Calling for help was useless, even if my voice could
have been heard above the noise of the boat; the door of my cabin was
locked. Swash, swash, in it came, more and more, and dirtier and
dirtier; trickling down the back of the red velvet sofa, drenching my
pillows and sheets, and spattering me. One of the few things one never
ceases being astonished at in this world is the length a minute can
seem when one is uncomfortable. It couldn't have been many minutes,
but it seemed an hour, before I had succeeded in partially fastening
that port-hole, unlocking that cabin door, and bringing Anna to the
rescue. Before she arrived the dirty swashes had left the first
port-hole and gone to the second, which, luckily, had been fastened
tight, and all danger was over. But if I had been afloat and in danger
of drowning, her sympathy could not have been greater. She came
running, her feet bare,--very white they were, too, and rosy pink on
the outside edges, like a baby's, I noticed,--and her gown but partly
on. It was only half-past four, and she had been, no doubt, as sound
asleep as I. With comic pantomime of distress, and repeated
exclamations of "Poor lady, poor lady!" which phrase I already knew by
heart, she gathered up the wet bed, made me another in a dry corner,
and then vanished; and I heard her telling the tale of my disaster, in
excited tones, to Katrina, who soon appeared with a look half
sympathy, half amusement, on her face.
"Now, dat is great tings," she said, giving the innocent port-hole
another hard twist at the handle. "I tink you vill be glad ven you
comes to Christiania. Dey say it vill be tere at ten, but I tink it is
only shtories."
It was not. Already we were well up in the smoothness and shelter of
the beautiful Christiania Fjord,--a great bay, which is in the
beginning like a sea looking southward into an ocean; then reaches up
northward, counting its miles by scores, shooting its shining inlets
to right and left, narrowing and yielding itself more and more to the
embrace of the land, till, suddenly, headed off by a knot of hills, it
turns around, and as if seeking the outer sea it has left behind runs
due south for miles, making the peninsula of Nesodden. On this
peninsula is the little town of Drobak, where thirty thousand pounds'
worth of ice is stored every winter, to be sold in London as "Wenham
Lake ice." This ice was in summer the water of countless little lakes.
The region round about the Christiania Fjord is set full of them,
lily-grown and fir-shaded. Once they freeze over, they are marked for
their destiny; the snow is kept from them; if the surface be too much
roughened it is planed; then it is lined off into great squares, cut
out by an ice plough, pried up by wedges, loaded on carts, and
carried to the ice-houses. There it is packed into solid bulk, with
layers of sawdust between to prevent the blocks from freezing together
again.
The fjord was so glassy smooth, as we sailed up, that even the
"Jupiter" could not roll, but glided; and seemed to try to hush its
jarring sounds, as if holding its breath, with sense of the shame it
was to disturb such sunny silence. The shores on either hand were
darkly wooded; here and there a country-seat on higher ground, with a
gay flag floating out. No Norwegian house is complete without its
flagstaff. On Sundays, on all holidays, on the birthdays of members of
the family, and on all days when guests are expected at the house, the
flag is run up. This pretty custom gives a festal air to all places,
since one can never walk far without coming on a house that keeps
either a birthday or a guest-day.
There seemed almost a mirage on the western shore of the bay. The
captain, noticing this, called my attention to it, and said it was
often to be seen on the Norway fjords, "but it was always on the
head." In reply to my puzzled look, he went on to say, by way of
making it perfectly clear, that "the mountains stood always on their
heads;" that is, "their heads down to the heads of the other
mountains." He then spoke of the strange looming of the water-line
often seen in Holland, where he had travelled; but where, he said he
never wished to go again, they were "such dirty people." This
accusation brought against the Dutch was indeed startling. I exclaimed
in surprise, saying that the world gave the Dutch credit for being the
cleanliest of people. Yes, he said, they did scrub; it was to be
admitted that they kept their houses clean; "but they do put the
spitkin on the table when they eat."
"Spitkin," cried I. "What is that? You do not mean spittoon, surely?"
"Yes, yes, that is it; the spitkin in which to spit. It is high, like
what we keep to put flowers in,--so high," holding his hand about
twelve inches from the table; "made just like what we put for flowers;
and they put it always on the table when they are eating. I have
myself seen it. And they do eat and spit, and eat and spit, ugh!" And
the captain shook himself with a great shudder, as well he might, at
the recollection. "I do never wish to see Holland again."
I took the opportunity then to praise the Norwegian spitkin, which is
a most ingenious device; and not only ingenious, but wholesome and
cleanly. It is an open brass pan, some four inches in depth, filled
with broken twigs of green juniper. These are put in fresh and clean
every day,--an invention, no doubt, of poverty in the first place; for
the Norwegian has been hard pressed for centuries, and has learned to
set his fragrant juniper and fir boughs to all manner of uses unknown
in other countries; for instance, spreading them down for outside
door-mats, in country-houses,--another pretty and cleanly custom. But
the juniper-filled spitkin is the triumph of them all, and he would be
a benefactor who would introduce its civilization into all countries.
The captain seemed pleased with my commendation, and said
hesitatingly,--
"There is a tale, that. They do say,--excuse me," bowing
apologetically,--"they do say that it is in America spitted
everywhere; and that an American who was in Norway did see the spitkin
on the stove, but did not know it was spitkin."
This part of the story I could most easily credit, having myself
looked wonderingly for several days at the pretty little oval brass
pan, filled with juniper twigs, standing on the hearth of the
turret-like stove in my Bergen bedroom, and having finally come to the
conclusion that the juniper twigs must be kept there for kindlings.
"So he did spit everywhere on the stove; it was all around spitted.
And when the servant came in he said, 'Take away that thing with green
stuff; I want to spit in that place.'"
The captain told this story with much hesitancy of manner and repeated
"excuse me's;" but he was reassured by my hearty laughter, and my
confession that my own ignorance of the proper use of the juniper
spitkin had been quite equal to my countryman's.
Christiania looks well, as one approaches it by water; it is snugged
in on the lower half of an amphitheatre of high wooded hills, which
open as they recede, showing ravines, and suggesting countless
delightful ways up and out into the country. Many ships lie in the
harbor; on either hand are wooded peninsulas and islands; and
everywhere are to be seen light or bright-colored country-houses. The
first expression of the city itself, as one enters it, is
disappointingly modern, if one has his head full of Haralds and Olafs,
and expects to see some traces of the old Osloe. The Christiania of
to-day is new, as newness is reckoned in Norway, for it dates back
only to the middle of the sixteenth century; but it is as
characteristically Norwegian as if it were older,--a pleasanter place
to stay in than Bergen, and a much better starting-point for Norway
travel.
"A cautious guest,
When he comes to his hostel,
Speaketh but little;
With his ears he listeneth,
With his eyes he looketh:
Thus the wise learneth,"
an old Norwegian song says.
When walking through the labyrinths of the Victoria Hotel in
Christiania, and listening with my ears, I heard dripping and plashing
water, and when, looking with my eyes, I saw long dark corridors, damp
courtyards, and rooms on which no sun ever had shone, I spoke little,
but forthwith drove away in search of airier, sunnier, drier quarters.
There were many mysterious inside balconies of beautiful gay flowers
at the Victoria, but they did not redeem it.
"I tink dat place is like a prison more tan it is like a hótle," said
Katrina, as we drove away; in which she was quite right. "I don't see
vhy tey need make a hótle like dat; nobody vould stay in prison!" At
the Hotel Scandinavie, a big room with six sides and five windows
pleased her better. "Dis is vat you like," she said; "here tere is
light."
Light! If there had only been darkness! In the Norway summer one comes
actually to yearn for a little Christian darkness to go to bed by;
much as he may crave a stronger sun by day, to keep him warm, he would
like to have a reasonable night-time for sleeping. At first there is a
stimulus, and a weird sort of triumphant sense of outwitting Nature,
in finding one's self able to read or to write by the sun's light till
nearly midnight of the clock. But presently it becomes clear that the
outwitting is on the other side. What avails it that there is light
enough for one to write by at ten o'clock at night, if he is tired
out, does not want to write, and longs for nothing but to go to sleep?
If it were dark, and he longed to write, nothing would be easier than
to light candles and write all night, if he chose and could pay for
his candles. But neither money nor ingenuity can compass for him a
normal darkness to sleep in. The Norwegian house is one-half window:
in their long winters they need all the sun they can get; not an
outside blind, not an inside shutter, not a dark shade, to be seen;
streaming, flooding, radiating in and round about the rooms, comes the
light, welcome or unwelcome, early and late. And to the words "early"
and "late" there are in a Norway summer new meanings: the early light
of the summer morning sets in about half-past two; the late light of
the summer evening fades into a luminous twilight about eleven.
Enjoyment of this species of perpetual day soon comes to an end. After
the traveller has written home to everybody once by broad daylight at
ten o'clock, the fun of the thing is over: normal sleepiness begins to
hunger for its rights, and dissatisfaction takes the place of
wondering amusement. This dissatisfaction reaches its climax in a few
days; then, if he is wise, the traveller provides himself with several
pieces of dark green cambric, which he pins up at his windows at
bedtime, thereby making it possible to get seven or eight hours' rest
for his tired eyes. But the green cambric will not shut out sounds:
and he is lucky if he is not kept awake until one or two o'clock every
night by the unceasing tread and loud chatter of the cheerful
Norwegians, who have been forced to form the habit of sitting up half
their night-time to get in the course of a year their full quota of
daytime.
"I tink King Ring lived not far from dis place," said Katrina,
stretching her head out of first one and then another of the five
windows, and looking up and down the busy streets; "not in
Christiania, but I tink not very far away. Did ever you hear of King
Ring? Oh, dat is our best story in all Norway,--te saga of King
Ring!"
"Cannot you tell it to me, Katrina?" said I, trying to speak as if I
had never heard of King Ring.
"Vell, King Ring, he loved Ingeborg. I cannot tell; I do not remember.
My father, you see,--not my right father, but my father the hatter, he
whose little home I showed you in Bergen,--he used to take books out
vere you pay so much for one week, you see; and I only get half an
hour, maybe, or few minutes, but I steal de book, and read all vat I
can. I vas only little den: oh, it is years ago. But it is our best
story in all Norway. Ingeborg was beauty, you see, and all in te
kings' families vat vanted her: many ghentlemens, and Ring, he killed
three or four I tink; and den after he killed dem three or four, den
he lost her, after all, don't you see; and tat was te fun of it."
"But I don't think that was funny at all, Katrina," I said. "I don't
believe King Ring thought it so."
"No, I don't tink, either; but den, you see, he had all killed for
nothing, and den he lost her himself. I tink it was on the ice: it
broke. A stranger told dem not to take the ice; but King Ring, he
would go. I tink dat was te way it was."
It was plain that Katrina's reminiscences of her stolen childish
readings of the Frithiof's Saga were incorrect as well as fragmentary,
but her eager enthusiasm over it was delicious. Her face kindled as
she repeated, "Oh, it is our best story in all Norway!" and when I
told her that the next day she should go to a circulating library and
get a copy of the book and read it to me, her eyes actually flashed
with pleasure.