she bore: "A copy of the Frithiof's Saga in Norwegian, [how guiltily I
feared she might stumble upon it in an English translation!] and
anything in the way of fruit or vegetables." These were her
instructions. It was an hour before she came back, flushed with
victory, sure of her success and of my satisfaction. She burst into
the room, brandishing in one hand two turnips and a carrot; in the
other she hugged up in front of her a newspaper, bursting and
red-stained, full of fresh raspberries; under her left arm, held very
tight, a little old copy of the Frithiof's Saga. Breathless, she
dropped the raspberries down, newspaper and all, in a rolling pile on
the table, exclaiming, "I tink I shall not get tese home, after I get
te oders in my oder hand! Are tese what you like?" holding the turnips
and carrot close up to my face. "I vas asking for oranges," she
continued, "but it is one month ago since they leaved Christiania."
"What!" I exclaimed.
"One mont ago since dey were to see in Christiania," she repeated
impatiently. "It is not mont since I vas eating dem in Bergen. I
tought in a great place like Christiania dere would be more tings as
in Bergen; but it is all shtories, you see."
How well I came to know the look of that little ragged old copy of the
grand Saga, and of Katrina's face, as she bent puzzling over it, every
now and then bursting out with some ejaculated bit of translation,
beginning always with, "Vell, you see!" I kept her hard at work at it,
reading it to me, while I lingered over my lonely breakfasts and
dinners, or while we sat under fragrant fir-trees on country hills.
Wherever we went, the little old book and Katrina's Norwegian and
English Dictionary, older still, went with us.
Her English always incalculably wrong and right, in startling
alternations, became a thousand times droller when she set herself to
deliberate renderings of the lines of the Saga. She went often, in one
bound, in a single stanza, from the extreme of nonsense to the climax
of poetical beauty of phrase; her pronunciation, always as unexpected
and irregular as her construction of phrases, grew less and less
correct, as she grew excited and absorbed in the tale. The troublesome
_th_ sound, which in ordinary conversation she managed to enunciate in
perhaps one time out of ten, disappeared entirely from her poetry; and
in place of it, came the most refreshing _t_'s and _d_'s. The worse
her pronunciation and the more broken her English, the better I liked
it, and the more poetical was the translation. Many men have tried
their hand at translation of the Frithiof's Saga, but I have read none
which gave me so much pleasure as I had from hearing Katrina's;
neither do I believe that any poet has studied and rewritten it,
however cultured he might be, with more enthusiasm and delight than
this Norwegian girl of the people, to whom many of the mythological
allusions were as unintelligible as if they had been written in
Sanskrit. She had a convenient way of disposing of those when she came
to such as she did not understand: "Dat's some o' dem old gods, you
see,--dem gods vat dey used to worship." It was evident from many of
Katrina's terms of expression, and from her peculiar delight in the
most poetical lines and thoughts in the Saga, that she herself was of
a highly poetical temperament. I was more and more impressed by this,
and began at last to marvel at the fineness of her appreciations. But
I was not prepared for her turning the tables suddenly upon me, as she
did one day, after I had helped her to a few phrases in a stanza over
which she had come to a halt in difficulties.
"As sure 's I'm aliv," she exclaimed, "I believe you're a poet your
own self, too!" While I was considering what reply to make to this
charge, she went on: "Dat's what tey call me in my own country. I can
make songs. I make a many: all te birtdays and all te extra days in
our family, all come to me and say, 'Now, Katrina, you has to make
song.' Dey tink I can make song in one minute for all! [What a kinship
is there, all the world over, in some sorts of misery!] Ven I've went
to America, I made a nice song," she added. "I vould like you to see."
"Indeed, I would like very much to see it, Katrina," I replied. "Have
you it here?"
"I got it in my head, here," she said, laughing, tapping her broad
forehead. "I keeps it in my head."
But it was a long time before I could persuade her to give it to me.
She persisted in saying that she could not translate it.
"Surely, Katrina," I said, "it cannot be harder than the Frithiof's
Saga, of which you have read me so much."
"Dat is very different," was all I could extract from her. I think
that she felt a certain pride in not having her own stanzas fail of
true appreciation owing to their being put in broken English. At last,
however, I got it. She had been hard at work a whole forenoon in her
room with her dictionary and pencil. In the afternoon she came to me,
holding several sheets of much-scribbled brown paper in her hand, and
said shyly, "Now I can read it." I wrote it down as she read it, only
in one or two instances helping her with a word, and here it is:--
SONG ON MY DEPARTURE FROM BERGEN FOR AMERICA.
The time of departure is near,
And I am no more in my home;
But, God, be thou my protector.
I don't know how it will go,
Out on the big ocean,
From my father and mother;
I don't know for sure where at last
My dwelling-place will be on the earth.
My thanks to all my dear,
To my foster father and mother;
In the distant land, as well as the near,
Your word shall be my guide.
It may happen that we never meet on earth,
But my wish is that God forever
Be with you and bless you.
Don't forget; bring my compliments over
To that place where my cradle stood,--
The dear Akrehavnske waves,
What I lately took leave of.
Don't mourn, my father and mother,
It is to my benefit;
My best thanks for all the goodness
You have bestowed on me.
A last farewell to you
All, my dear friends;
May the life's fortune, honor, and glory
Be with you wherever you are!
I know you are all standing
In deep thoughts
When Harald Haarfager weighs anchor,
And I am away from you.
A wreath of memory
I will twine or twist round
My dear native land,
And as a lark happy sing
This my well-meaned song.
Oh, that we all may be
Wreathed with glory,
And in the last carry our wreaths of glory
In heaven's hall!
Watching my face keenly, she read my approbation of her simple little
song, and nodding her head with satisfaction, said,--
"Oh, sometime you see I ain't quite that foolish I look to! I got big
book of all my songs. Nobody but myself could read dem papers. It is
all pulled up, and five six words standing one on top of oder."
II.
Murray's Guide-book, that paradoxical union of the false and the true,
says of Christiania, "There is not much of interest in the town, and
it may be seen in from four to five hours." The person who made that
statement did not have Katrina with him, and perhaps ought therefore
to be forgiven. He had not strolled with her through the market square
of a morning, and among the old women, squatted low, with half a dozen
flat, open baskets of fruit before them: blueberries, currants,
raspberries, plums, pears, and all shades, sizes, and flavors of
cherries, from the pale and tasteless yellow up to those wine-red and
juicy as a grape; the very cherry, it must have been, which made
Lucullus think it worth while to carry the tree in triumphal
procession into Rome. Queer little wooden boxes set on four low
wheels, with a short pole, by which a strong man or woman can draw
them, are the distinctive features of out-door trade in the
Christiania market-places. A compacter, cheaper device for combining
storage, transportation, and exhibition was never hit on. The boxes
hold a great deal. They make a good counter; and when there are twenty
or thirty of them together, with poles set up at the four corners, a
clothes-line fastened from pole to pole and swung full of cheap stuffs
of one sort and another, ready-made garments, hats, caps, bonnets,
shoes, clothespins, wooden spoons, baskets, and boxes,--the venders
sitting behind or among their wares, on firkins bottom side up,--it is
a spectacle not to be despised; and when a market-place, filled with
such many-colored fluttering merchandise as this, is also flanked by
old-clothes stalls which are like nothing except the Ghetto, or Rag
Fair in London, it is indeed worth looking at. To have at one's side
an alert native, of frugal mind and unsparing tongue, belonging to
that class of women who can never see a low-priced article offered for
sale without, for the moment, contemplating it as a possible purchase,
adds incalculably to the interest of a saunter through such a market.
The thrifty Katrina never lost sight of the possibility of lighting
upon some bargain of value to her home housekeeping; and our rooms
filled up from day to day with her acquisitions. She was absolutely
without false pride in the matter of carrying odd burdens. One day she
came lugging a big twisted door-mat with, "You see dat? For de door.
In Bergen I give exact double." The climax of her purchases was a fine
washboard, which she brought in in her arms, and exclaimed, laughing,
"What you tink the porter say to me? He ask if I am going to take in
washing up here. I only give two crowns for dat," she said, eying it
with the fondest exultation, and setting it in a conspicuous place,
leaning against the side of the room; "it is better as I get for four
in Bergen." Good little Katrina! her hands were too white and pretty
to be spoiled by hard rubbing on a washboard. They were her one
vanity, and it was pardonable.
"Did you ever see hand like mine?" she said one day, spreading her
right hand out on the table. "Dere was two English ladies, dey say it
ought to be made in warx, and send to see in Crystal Palace. See dem?"
she continued, sticking her left forefinger into the four dimples
which marked the spots where knuckles are in ordinary hands; "dem is
nice." It was true. The hand was not small, but it was a model: plump,
solid, dimples for knuckles, all the fingers straight and shapely;
done in "warx," it would have been a beautiful thing, and her pleasure
in it was just as guileless as her delight in her washboard.
As she delved deeper in her Frithiof's Saga, she discovered that she
had been greatly wrong in her childish impressions of the story. "It
was not as I tought," she said: "King Ring did get Ingeborg after; but
he had to die, and leaved her."
When we went out to Oscar's Hall, which is a pretty country-seat of
the king's, on the beautiful peninsula of Ladegaardsöen, she was far
more interested in the sculptured cornice which told the story of
Frithiof and Ingeborg, than in any of the more splendid things, or
those more suggestive of the life of the king. The rooms are showily
decorated: ceilings in white with gold stars, walls panelled with
velvet; gay-colored frescos, and throne-like chairs in which "many
kings and queens have sat," the old woman who kept the keys said.
Everywhere were the royal shields with the crown and the lion; at the
corners of the doors, at the crossings of ceiling beams, above
brackets, looking-glasses, and on chair-backs.
"I tink the king get tired looking at his crown all de time," remarked
Katrina, composedly. "I wonder vere dey could put in one more."
The bronze statues of some of the old kings pleased her better. She
studied them carefully: Olaf and Harald Haarfager, Sverre Sigurdson
and Olaf Tryggvesson; they stand leaning upon their spears, as if on
guard. The face of Harald looks true to the record of him: a
fair-haired, blue-eyed man, who stopped at nothing when he wanted his
way, and was just as ready to fall in love with six successive women
after he had labored hard twelve years for Gyda, and won her, as
before.
"He is de nicest," said Katrina, lingering before his statue, and
reaching up and fingering the bronze curiously. "Ain't it wonderful
how dey can make such tings!" she added with a deep-drawn sigh. But
when I pointed to the cornice, and said, "Katrina, I think that must
be the story of the Frithiof's Saga," she bounded, and threw her head
back, like a deer snuffing the wind. "Ja, ja," cried the old woman,
evidently pleased that I recognized it, and then she began to pour out
the tale. Is there a peasant in all Norway that does not know it, I
wonder? The first medallion was of the children, Frithiof and
Ingeborg, playing together. "Dere," said Katrina, "dat is vat I told
you. Two trees growed in one place, nicely in the garden; one growed
with de strongth of de oak, dat was Frithiof; and de rose in the green
walley, dat was Ingeborg de beauty."
Very closely she scanned the medallions one after the other,
criticising their fidelity to the record. When she came to the one
where Frithiof is supporting King Ring on his knee, fainting, or
sleeping, she exclaimed, "Dere, if he had been dat bad, he could have
killed King Ring den, ven he was sleeping; but see, he have thrown his
sword away;" and at last, when the sculpture represented King Ring
dying, and bequeathing his beautiful queen and her children to
Frithiof, she exclaimed, "Dere, dem two boys belongs to King Ring; but
now Frithiof gets her. Dat is good, after all dat dem two had gone
through with."
King Oscar makes very little use of this pretty country-house. He
comes there sometimes once or twice in the course of a summer, for a
day, or part of a day, but never to sleep, the old woman said. All the
rest of the time it is empty and desolate, with only this one poor old
woman to keep it tidy; a good berth for her, but a pity that nobody
should be taking comfort all summer in the superb outlooks and
off-looks from its windows and porch, and in the shady walks along the
banks of the fjord. One of the old Norway kings, Hakon, thought the
peninsula beautiful enough for a wedding morning gift to his queen;
but it seems not to have been held so dear by her as it ought, for she
gave it away to the monks who lived on the neighboring island of
Hovedöen. Then, in the time of the Reformation, when monks had to
scatter and go begging, and monastic properties were lying about loose
everywhere, the Norwegian kings picked up Ladegaardsöen again, and it
has been a crown property ever since.
One of the most charming of the short drives in what Katrina called
"the nearance" of Christiania is to the "Grefsens Bad," a water-cure
establishment only two miles away, by road, to the north, but lying so
much higher up than the town that it seems to lie in another
world,--as in fact it does; for, climbing there, one rises to another
and so different air that he becomes another man, being born again
through his lungs. It is a good pull up a stony and ill-kept road, to
reach the place; but it is more than worth while, for the sake of the
clear look-out to sea, over a delicious foreground of vivid green
fields and woods.
"This is the place where all the sick peoples in Norway do come when
de doctors cannot do nottings more for dem," said Katrina; "den dey
comes here. Here came our last king, King Oscar, and den he did die
on the dock ven he vas coming away. He had all de climb dis hill vor
notting. Ven it is the time, one has to go, no matter how much money
dey will pay; dere is One"--here she stopped hesitating for a
word--"you know all vat I mean: dere is One what has it all his own
way, not de way we wish it shall be." This she said devoutly, and was
silent for an unwonted length of time afterwards.
As we were driving down the steepest part of the hill, a man came
running after us, calling so loudly to us to stop that we were
alarmed, thinking something must be wrong with our carriage or in the
road. Not at all. He was a roadside merchant; not precisely a pedler,
since he never went out of his own town, but a kind of aristocratic
vender in a small circuit, it seemed; we saw him afterwards in other
suburbs, bearing with him the same mysterious basket, and I very much
fear, poor fellow, the same still more mysterious articles in it. Not
even on Norwegian country-roads, I think, could there be found many
souls so dead to all sense of beauty as to buy the hideous and costly
combinations which he insisted upon laying in my lap: a sofa-cushion,
square, thick, and hard, of wine-colored velvet, with a sprawling tree
and bird laid upon it in an appliqué pattern cut out of black and
white velvet; a long and narrow strip of the same velvet, with the
same black and white velvet foliage and poultry, was trimmed at the
ends with heavy fringe, and intended for a sideboard or a bureau; a
large square tablecloth to match completed the list of his
extraordinary wares. It was so odd a wayside incident that it seemed
to loom quite out of its normal proportions as a mere effort at
traffic. He insisted on spreading the articles in my lap. He could not
be persuaded to take them away. The driver turning round on his seat,
and Katrina leaning over from hers, both rapt in admiration of the
monstrosities, were stolidly oblivious of my indifference. The things
seemed to grow bigger and bigger each moment, and more and more
hideous, and it was at last only by a sudden effort of sternness, as
if shaking off a spell, that I succeeded in compelling the man to lift
them from my knees and fold them away in his basket. As soon as he had
gone, I was seized with misgivings that I had been ungracious; and
these misgivings were much heightened by Katrina's soliloquizing as
follows:--
"He! I tink he never take dem tings away. His wife are sick; dat is de
reason he is on de road instead of her. He was sure you would buy
dem."
I hope they are sold. I wish I could know.
The suburbs of Christiania which lie along the road to the Grefsens
Bad are ugly, dusty, and unpleasing. "I tink we go some oder way dan
way we came," said Katrina. "Dere must be better way." So saying, she
stopped the driver abruptly, and after some vigorous conversation he
took another road.
"He ask more money to go by St. John's Hill, but I tell him you not
pay any more. I can see it is not farther; I ask him if he tink I got
eyes in de head," she said scornfully, waving her fat fingers towards
the city which lay close at hand.
"Ah, dat is great day," she continued, "St. John's Day. Keep you dat
in America? Here it is fires all round, from one hill to one hill. Dat
is from de old time. I tink it is from Catolics. Dey did do so much
for dem old saints, you see. I tink dat is it; but I tink dey do not
just know in Norway to-day what for dey do it. It has been old custom
from parents to parents."
Then I told her about Balder and his death, and asked her if she had
never seen the country people put a boat on the top of their bonfire
on St. John's Eve.
"Yes, I did see dat, once, in Stavanger," she replied, "but it was old
boat; no use any more. I tink dat be to save wood. It are cheapest
wood dey have, old boat. Dat were not to give to any god."
"No, you are mistaken, Katrina," I said. "They have done that for
hundreds of years in Norway. It is to remind them of Balder's great
ship, the Hringhorn, and to commemorate his death."
"May be," she said curtly, "but I don't tink. I only see dat once; and
all my life I see de fires, all round Bergen, and everywhere, and dere
was no boat on dem. I don't tink."
We drove into the city through one of the smaller fruit markets,
where, late as it was, the old women still lingered with their baskets
of cherries, pears, and currants. They were not losing time, for they
were all knitting, fast as their fingers could fly; such a thing as a
Norwegian wasting time is not to be seen, I verily believe, from the
North Cape to the Skager Rack, and one would think that they knit
stockings enough for the whole continent of Europe; old men, old
women, little girls, and even little boys, all knitting, knitting,
morning, noon, and night, by roadsides, on door-sills, in
market-places; wherever they sit down, or stand, to rest, they knit.
As our carriage stopped, down went the stockings, balls rolling, yarn
tangling, on the sidewalk, and up jumped the old women, all crowding
round me, smiling, each holding out a specimen of her fruit for me to
taste. "Eat, lady, eat. It is good." "Eat and you will buy." "No such
cherries as these in Christiania." "Taste of my plums." A chorus of
imploring voices and rattling hail of _sks_. Hurried and confused talk
in the Norwegian tongue as spoken by uneducated people is a
bewildering racket; it hardly sounds like human voices. If the smiles
did not redeem it, it would be something insupportable; but the smiles
do redeem it, transfigure it, lift it up to the level of superior
harmonies. Such graciousness of eye and of smiling lips triumphs over
all possible discord of sound, even over the Norwegian battery of
consonants.
Katrina fired back to them all. I fear she reproved them; for they
subsided suddenly into silence, and left the outstretched withered
palms holding the fruit to speak for themselves.
"I only tell dem you cannot buy all de market out. You can say vat you
like," she said.
Pears and cherries, and plums too, because the old plum-woman looked
poorer than the rest, I bought; and as we drove away the chorus
followed us again with good wishes. "Dey are like crazy old vomans,"
remarked Katrina; "I never heard such noise of old vomans to once time
before." A few minutes after we reached the house she disappeared
suddenly, and presently returned with a little cantaloupe melon in her
hands. Standing before me, with a curious and hesitating look on her
face, she said, "Is dis vat you like?"
"Oh, yes," I exclaimed, grateful for the sight. "I was longing for one
yesterday. Where did you get it?"
"I not get it. I borrow it for you to see. I tell the man I bring it
back," she replied, still with the same curious expressions of doubt
flitting over her queer little face.
"Why, whose melon is it?" I exclaimed. "What did you bring it for if
it were not for sale?"
"Oh, it is for selled, if you like to buy," she said, still with the
hesitant expression.
"Of course I like to buy it," I said impatiently. "How much does it
cost?"
"Dat is it," replied Katrina, sententiously. "It is too dear to buy, I
tell the man; but he said I should bring it to you, to see. I tink you
vill not buy it;" still with the quizzical look on her face.
Quite out of patience, I cried, "But why don't you tell me the price
of it? I should like it very much. It can't be so very dear."
"Dat it can," answered Katrina, chuckling, at last letting out her
suppressed laugh. "He ask six kroner for dat ting; and I tink you not
buy it at such price, so I bring to make you laugh."
One dollar and sixty-two cents for a tiny cantaloupe! Katrina had her
reward. "Oh, but I am dat glad ven I make you laugh," she said
roguishly, picking up her melon, as I cried out with surprise and
amusement,--
"I should think not. I never heard of such a price for a melon."
"So I tink," said Katrina. "I ask de man who buy dem melons, and he
say plenty peoples; but I tink it is all shtories." And she ran
downstairs laughing so that I heard her, all the way, two flights down
to the door.