northwest of Christiania is a spot of light color. In the early
morning it is vivid green; sometimes at sunset it catches a tint of
gold; but neither at morn nor at night can it ever be overlooked. It
is a perpetual lure to the eye, and stimulus to the imagination. What
eyry is it that has cleared for itself this loop-hole in the solid
mountain-forest? Is it a clearing, or only a bit of varied wooding of
a contrasting color to the rest? For several days I looked at it
before I asked; and I had grown so impressed by its mystery and charm,
that when I found it was a house, the summer home of a rich
Christiania family, and one of the places always shown to travellers,
I felt more than half-way minded not to go near it,--to keep it still
nothing more than a far-away, changing, luring oasis of sunny gold or
wistful green on the mountain-side. Had it been called by any other
name, my instinct to leave it unknown might have triumphed; but the
words "Frogner Sæter" were almost as great a lure to the imagination
as the green oasis itself. The sæter, high up on some mountain-side,
is the fulfilling of the Norwegian out-door life, the key-note of the
Norwegian summer. The gentle kine know it as well as their mistresses
who go thither with them. Three months in the upper air, in the spicy
and fragrant woods,--no matter if it be solitary and if the work be
hard, the sæter life must be the best the Norwegians know,--must
elevate and develop them, and strengthen them for their long, sunless
winters. I had looked up from the Vossevangen Valley, from Ringeriket,
and from the Hardanger country to many such gleaming points of lighter
green, tossed up as it were on the billowy forests. They were beyond
the reach of any methods of ascent at my command; unwillingly I had
accepted again and again the wisdom of the farm people, who said "the
road up to the sæter was too hard for those who were not used to it."
Reluctantly I had put the sæter out of my hopes, as a thing to be
known only by imagination and other people's descriptions. Therefore
the name of the Frogner Sæter was a lure not to be resisted; a sæter
to which one might drive in a comfortable carriage over a good road
could not be the ideal sæter of the wild country life, but still it
was called "sæter;" we would go, and we would take a day for the going
and coming.
"Dat will be bestest," said Katrina. "I tink you like dat high place
better as Christiania."
On the way we called at the office of a homoeopathic physician,
whose name had been given to me by a Bergen friend. He spoke no
English, and for the first time Katrina's failed. I saw at once that
she did not convey my meanings to him, nor his to me, with accuracy.
She was out of her depth. Her mortification was droll; it reached the
climax when it came to the word "dynamic." Poor little child! How
should she have known that!
"I vill understand! I vill!" she exclaimed; and the good-natured
doctor took pains to explain to her at some length; at the end of his
explanation she turned to me triumphantly, with a nod: "Now I know
very well; it is another kind of strongth from the strongth of a
machine. It is not such strongth that you can see, or you can make
with your hands; but it is strongth all the same,"--a definition which
might be commended to the careful attention of all persons in the
habit or need of using the word "dynamic."
It is five miles from Christiania out and up to the Frogner Sæter,
first through pretty suburban streets which are more roads than
streets, with picturesque wooden houses, painted in wonderful
colors,--lilac, apple-green, white with orange-colored settings to
doors and windows, yellow pine left its own color, oiled, and
decorated with white or with maroon red. They look like the gay
toy-houses sold in boxes for children to play with. There is no one of
them, perhaps, which one would not grow very weary of, if he had to
see it every day, but the effect of the succession of them along the
roadside is surprisingly gay and picturesque. Their variety of shape
and the pretty little balconies of carved lattice-work add much to
this picturesqueness. They are all surrounded by flower-gardens of a
simple kind,--old-fashioned flowers growing in clumps and straight
borders, and every window-sill full of plants in bloom; windows all
opening outward like doors, so that in a warm day, when every
window-sash is thrown open, the houses have a strange look of being
a-flutter. There is no expression of elegance or of the habits or
standards of great wealth about these suburban houses of Christiania;
but there is a very rare and charming expression of comfort and good
cheer, and a childlike simplicity which dotes on flowers and has not
outgrown the love of bright colors. I do not know anywhere a region
where houses are so instantly and good-naturedly attractive, with a
suggestion of good fellowship, and sensible, easy-going good times
inside and out.
The last three miles of the road to the sæter are steadily up, and all
the way through dense woods of fir and spruce,--that grand Norway
spruce, which spreads its boughs out generously as palms, and loads
down each twig so full that by their own weight of shining green the
lower branches trail out along the ground, and the upper ones fold a
little and slant downwards from the middle, as if avalanches of snow
had just slid off on each side and bent them. Here were great beds of
ferns, clusters of bluebells, and territories of Linnæa. In June the
mountain-side must be fragrant with its flowers.
Katrina glowed with pleasure. In her colder, barrener home she had
seen no such lavishness as this.
"Oh, but ven one tinks, how Nature is wonderful!" she cried. "Here all
dese tings grow up, demselves! noting to be done. Are dey not wort
more dan in gardens? In gardens always must be put in a corn before
anyting come up; and all dese nice tings come up alone, demselves."
"Oh, but see vat God has done; how much better than all vat people
can; no matter vat dey make."
Half-way up the mountain we came to a tiny house, set in a clearing
barely big enough to hold the house and let a little sun in on it from
above.
"Oh, I wish-shed I had dat little house!" she exclaimed. "Dat house
could stand in Bergen. I like to carry dat home and dem trees to it;
but my husband, he would not like it. He likes Bergen house bestest."
As we drew near the top, we met carriages coming down. Evidently it
was the custom to drive to the Frogner Sæter.
"I tink in dat first carriage were Chews," said Katrina, scornfully.
"I do hate dem Chews. I can't bear dat kind of people."
"Why not, Katrina?" I asked. "It is not fair to hate people because of
their religion."
"Oh, dat I don't know about deir religion," she replied carelessly. "I
don't tink dey got much religion anyhow. I tink dey are kind of
thieves. I saw it in New York. Ven I went into Chew shop, he say a
ting are tree dollar; and I say, 'No, dat are too dear.' Den he say,
'You can have for two dollar;' and I say, 'No, I cannot take;' and den
he say, 'Oh, have it for one dollar and half;' and I tink all such
tings are not real. I hate dem Chews. Dey are all de same in all
places. Dey are chust like dat if dey come in Norway. Very few Chews
comes in Norway. Dat is one good ting."
In a small open, part clearing, part natural rocky crest of the hill,
stood the sæter: great spaces of pink heather to right and left of it,
a fir wood walling it on two sides; to the south and the east, a clear
off-look over the two bays of the Christiania Fjord, past all their
islands, out to sea, and the farthest horizon. Christiania lay like an
insignificant huddle of buildings in the nearer foreground; its only
beauty now being in its rich surrounding of farm-lands, which seemed
to hold it like a rough brown pebble in an emerald setting.
The house itself fronted south. Its piazza and front windows commanded
this grand view. It was of pine logs, smoothed and mortised into each
other at the corners. Behind it was a hollow square of the farm
buildings: sheds, barns, and the pretty white cottage of the overseer.
The overseer's wife came running to meet us, and with cordial
good-will took us into the house, and showed us every room. She had
the pride of a retainer in the place; and when she found that none of
its beauty was lost on me, she warmed and grew communicative. It will
not be easy to describe the charm of this log-house: only logs inside
as well as out; but the logs are Norway pine, yellow and hard and
shining, taking a polish for floors and ceiling as fine as ash or
maple, and making for the walls belts and stripes of gold color better
than paper; all cross beams and partitions are mortised at the
joinings, instead of crossing and lapping. This alone gives to these
Norwegian houses an expression quite unlike that of ordinary
log-houses. A little carved work of a simple pattern, at the cornices
of the rooms and on the ceiling beams, was the only ornamentation of
the house; and a great glass door, of a single pane, opening on the
piazza, was the only luxurious thing about it. Everything else was
simply and beautifully picturesque. Old Norwegian tapestries hung here
and there on the walls, their vivid reds and blues coming out superbly
on the yellow pine; curious antique corner cupboards, painted in
chaotic colors of fantastic brightness; old fireplaces built out into
the room, in the style of the most ancient Norwegian farm-houses; old
brasses, sconces, placques, and candlesticks; and a long dining-table,
with wooden benches of hollowed planks for seats, such as are to be
seen to-day in some of the old ruined baronial castles in England.
In the second-story rooms were old-fashioned bedsteads: one of carved
pine, so high that it needed a step-ladder to mount it; the other
built like a cupboard against the wall, and shut by two sliding doors,
which on being pushed back disclosed two narrow bunks. This is the
style of bed in many of the Norwegian farm-houses still. On the
sliding door of the upper bunk was a small photograph of the prince
imperial; and the woman told us with great pride that he had slept one
night in that bed.
Upstairs again, by narrow winding stairs, and there we found the whole
floor left undivided save by the big chimney-stack which came up in
the middle; the gable ends of the garret opened out in two great doors
like barn-doors; under the eaves, the whole length of each side, was a
row of bunk beds, five on each side, separated only by a board
partition. This was a great common bedroom, "used for gentlemen at
Christmas-time," the woman said. "There had as many as fifteen or
twenty gentlemen slept in that room."
At Christmas, it seems, it is the habit of the family owning this
unique and charming country-house to come up into the woods for a two
weeks' festivity. The snow is deep. The mercury is well down near zero
or below; but the road up the mountain is swept level smooth: sledges
can go easier in winter than carriages can in summer; and the vast
outlook over the glittering white land and shining blue sea full of
ice islands must be grander than when the islands and the land are
green. Pine logs in huge fireplaces can warm any room; and persons of
the sort that would think of spending Christmas in a fir-wood on a
mountain-top could make a house warm even better than pine logs could
do it. Christmas at the Frogner Sæter must be a Christmas worth
having.
"The house is as full as ever it can hold," said the woman, "and fifty
sit down to dinner sometimes; they think nothing of driving up from
Christiania and down again at midnight."
What a place for sleigh-bells to ring on a frosty night; that rocky
hill-crest swung out as it were in clear space of upper air, with the
great Christiania Fjord stretching away beneath, an ice-bound,
ice-flaked sea, white and steel-black under the winter moon! I fancied
the house blazing like a many-sided beacon out of the darkness of the
mountain front at midnight, the bells clanging, the voices of lovers
and loved chiming, and laughter and mirth ringing. I think for years
to come the picture will be so vivid in my mind that I shall find
myself on many a Christmas night mentally listening to the swift bells
chiming down the mountain from the Frogner Sæter.
The eastern end of the piazza is closed in by a great window, one
single pane of glass like the door; so that in this corner, sheltered
from the wind, but losing nothing of the view, one can sit in even
cold weather. Katrina cuddled herself down like a kitten, in the sun,
on the piazza steps, and looking up at me, as I sat in this sheltered
corner, said approvingly,--
"Dis you like. I ask de voman if we could stay here; but she got no
room: else she would like to keep us. I tink I stay here all my life:
only for my husband, I go back."
Then she pulled out the Saga and read some pages of Ingeborg's Lament,
convulsing me in the beginning by saying that it was "Ingeborg's
Whale." It was long before I grasped that she meant "Wail."
"What you say ven it is like as if you cry, but you do not cry?" she
said. "Dat is it. It stands in my dictionary, whale!" And she
reiterated it with some impatience at my stupidity in not better
understanding my own language. When I explained to her the vast
difference between "whale" and "wail," she was convulsed in her turn.
"Oh, dere are so many words in English which do have same sound and
mean so different ting," she said, "I tink I never learn to speak
English in dis world."
While we were sitting there, a great speckled woodpecker flew out from
the depths of the wood, lighted on a fir near the house, and began
racing up and down the tree, tapping the bark with his strong bill,
like the strokes of a hammer.
"There is your Gertrude bird, Katrina," said I. She looked bewildered.
"The woman that Christ punished," I said, "and turned her into the
Gertrude bird; do you not know the old story?" No, she had never heard
it. She listened with wide-open eyes while I told her the old
Norwegian legend, which it was strange that I knew and she did
not,--how Christ and Peter, stopping one day at the door of a woman
who was kneading her bread, asked her for a piece. She broke a piece
for them; but as she was rolling it out, it grew under her roller till
it filled her table. She laid it aside, saying it was too large, broke
off another piece, rolled it out with the same result; it grew larger
every moment. She laid that aside, and took a third bit, the smallest
she could possibly break off: the same result; that too grew under her
roller till it covered the table. Then her heart was entirely
hardened, and she laid this third piece on one side, saying, "Go your
ways, I cannot spare you any bread to-day." Then Christ was angry, and
opened her eyes to see who he was. She fell on her knees, and implored
his forgiveness; but he said, "No. You shall henceforth seek your
bread from day to day, between the wood and the bark." And he changed
her into a bird,--the Gertrude bird, or woodpecker. The legend runs,
however, that, relenting, the Lord said that when the plumage of the
bird should become entirely black, her punishment should be at an end.
The Gertrude bird grows darker and darker every year, and when it is
old, has no white to be seen in its plumage. When the white has all
disappeared, then the Lord Christ takes it for his own, so the legend
says; and no Norwegian will ever injure a Gertrude bird, because he
believes it to be under God's protection, doing this penance.
"Is dat true?" asked Katrina, seriously. "Dat must have been when de
Lord was going about on dis earth; ven he was ghost. I never hear
dat."
I tried to explain to her the idea of a fable.
"Fable," she said, "fable,--dat is to teach people to be giving ven
dey got, and not send peoples away vidout notings. Dat's what I see,
many times I see. But I do not see dat de peoples dat is all for
saving all dey got, gets any richer. I tink if you give all the time
to dem dat is poorer, dat is de way to be richer. Dere is always some
vat is poorer."
In the cosey little sitting-room of her white cottage, the farmer's
wife gave us a lunch which would not have been any shame to any lady's
table,--scrambled eggs, bread, rusks, milk, and a queer sort of
election cake, with raisins but no sugar. This Katrina eyed with the
greed of a child; watched to see if I liked it, and exclaimed, "We
only get dat once a year, at Christmas time." Seeing that I left a
large piece on my plate, she finally said, "Do you tink it would be
shame if I take dat home? It is too good to be leaved." With great
glee, on my first word of permission, she crammed it into her
omnivorous pocket, which already held a dozen or more green apples
that she had persisted in picking up by the roadside as we came.
As we drove down the mountain, the glimpses here and there, between
the trees, of the fjord and islands were even more beautiful than the
great panorama seen from the top. Little children ran out to open
gates for us, and made their pretty Norwegian courtesies, with smiles
of gratitude for a penny. We met scores of peasant women going out to
their homes, bearing all sorts of burdens swung from a yoke laid
across their shoulders. The thing that a Norwegian cannot contrive to
swing from one side or the other of his shoulder-yoke must be very big
indeed. The yokes seem equally adapted to everything, from a
butter-firkin to a silk handkerchief full of cabbages. Weights which
would be far too heavy to carry in any other way the peasants take in
this, and trot along between their swinging loads at as round a pace
as if they had nothing to carry. We drove a roundabout way to our
hotel, to enable Katrina to see an old teacher of hers; through street
after street of monotonous stucco-walled houses, each with a big open
door, a covered way leading into a court behind, and glimpses of
clothes-lines, or other walls and doorways, or green yards, beyond.
Two thirds of the houses in Christiania are on this plan; the families
live in flats, or parts of flats. Sometimes there are eight or ten
brass bell-handles, one above another, on the side of one of these big
doorways, each door-bell marking a family. The teacher lived in a
respectable but plain house of this kind,--she and her sister; they
had taught Katrina in Bergen when she was a child, and she retained a
warm and grateful memory of them; one had been married, and her
husband was in America, where they were both going to join him soon.
Everywhere in Norway one meets people whose hearts are in
America,--sons, husbands, daughters, lovers. Everybody would go if it
were possible; once fourteen thousand went in one year, I was told.
These poor women had been working hard to support themselves by
teaching and by embroidering. Katrina brought down, to exhibit to me,
a dog's head, embroidered in the finest possible silks,--silks that
made a hair-stroke like a fine pen; it was a marvellously ingenious
thing, but no more interesting than the "Lord's Prayer written in the
circumference of two inches," or any of that class of marvels.
"Dey take dese to America," Katrina said. "Did you ever see anyting
like dem dere? Dey get thirty kroner for one of dem dogs. It is chust
like live dog."
After we returned, Katrina disappeared again on one of her mysterious
expeditions, whose returns were usually of great interest to me. This
time they brought to both of us disappointment. Coming in with a
radiant face, and the usual little newspaper bundle in her hand, she
cried out, "Now I got you de bestest ting yet," and held out her
treasures,--a pint of small berries, a little larger than
whortleberries, and as black and shining as jet. "Dis is de bestest
berry in all Norway," she exclaimed, whipping one into her own mouth;
"see if you like."
I incautiously took three or four at once. Not since the days of
old-fashioned Dover's and James's powders have I ever tasted a more
nauseous combination of flavors than resided in those glittering black
berries.
"You not like dem berries?" cried poor Katrina, in dismay at my
disgust, raising her voice and its inflections at every syllable. "You
not like dem berries? I never hear of nobody not liking dem berries.
Dey is bestest we got! Any way, I eat dem myself," she added
philosophically, and retreated crestfallen to her room, where I heard
her smacking her lips over them for half an hour. I believe she ate
the whole at a sitting. They must have been a variety of black
currant, and exclusively intended by Nature for medicinal purposes;
but Katrina came out hearty and well as ever the next day, after
having swallowed some twelve or sixteen ounces of them.
By way of atoning for her mishap with the berries, she ran out early
the next morning and bought a little packet of odds and ends of
strong-scented leaves and dust of several kinds, and, coming up behind
my chair, held it close under my nose, with,--
"Ain't dat nice smell? Ain't dat better as dem berries? Oh, I tink I
never stop laughing ven I am at home ven I tink how you eat dem
berries. Dey are de bestest berries we got."
On my approving the scent, she seemed much pleased, and laid the
little packet on my table, remarking that I could "chust smell it ven
I liked." She added that in the winter-time they kept it in all
Norwegian houses, and strewed it on the stoves when they were hot, and
it "smelled beautiful." They called it "king's smoke," she said, and
nobody would be without it.
It is easy to see why the Norwegians, from the king down, must need
some such device as this to make tolerable the air in their
stove-heated rooms in winter. It was appalling to look at their four
and five storied stoves, and think how scorched the air must be by
such a mass of heated iron. The average Norwegian stove is as high as
the door of the room, or even higher. It is built up of sections of
square-cornered hollow iron pipe, somewhat as we build card-houses;
back and forth, forward and back, up and across, through these hollow
blocks of cast-iron, goes the heated air. It takes hours to get the
tower heated from bottom to top; but once it is heated there is a
radiating mass of burnt iron, with which it must be terrible to be
shut up. The open spaces between the cross sections must be very
convenient for many purposes,--to keep all sorts of things hot; and a
man given to the habit of tipping back in his chair, and liking to sit
with his feet higher than his head, could keep his favorite attitude
and warm his feet at the same time,--a thing that couldn't be done
with any other sort of stove.
One of my last days in Christiania was spent on the island of
Hovedöen, a short half-hour's row from the town. Here are the ruins of
an old monastery, dating back to the first half of the twelfth
century, and of priceless interest to antiquarians, who tell, inch by
inch, among the old grass-grown stones, just where the abbot sat, and
the monks prayed, and through which arch they walked at vespers. Bits
of the old carved cornices are standing everywhere, leaning up against
the moss-grown walls, which look much less old for being hoary with
moss. One thing they had in the monastery of Hovedöen,--a well of
ice-cold, sparkling water, which might have consoled them for much
lack of wine; and if the limes and poplars and birches were half as
beautiful in 1147 as they are now, the monks were to be envied, when a
whole nunneryful of nuns took refuge on their island in the time of
the first onslaught on convents. What strolls under those trees! There
are several species of flowers growing there now which grow nowhere
else in all the region about, and tradition says that these nuns
planted them. The paths are edged with heather and thyme and
bluebells, and that daintiest of little vetches, the golden yellow,
whose blossoms were well named by the devout sisters "Mary's golden
shoes." As we rowed home at sunset over the amber and silver water,
Katrina sang Norwegian songs; her voice, though untrained and shrill,
had sweet notes in it, and she sang with the same childlike heartiness
and innocent exultation that she showed in everything else. "Old
Norway" was the refrain of the song she liked most and sang best; and
more than one manly Norwegian voice joined in with hers with good-will
and fervor.
At the botanical gardens a Victoria regia was on the point of
blooming. Day after day I had driven out there to see it; each day
confident, each day disappointed. The professor, a quaint and learned
old man, simple in speech and behavior, as all great scientific men
are, glided about in a linen coat, his shears hanging in a big sheath
on one side his belt, his pruning-knife on the other, and a big
note-book in his breast-pocket. His life seemed to me one of the few
ideal ones I had ever seen. His house stands on a high terrace in the
garden, looking southward, over the city to the fjord. It is a long,
low cottage, with dormer windows sunk deep in the red-tiled roof,
shaded by two great horsechestnut trees, which are so old that clumps
of grass have grown in their gnarled knots. Here he plants and watches
and studies; triumphs over the utmost rigors of the Norway climate,
and points with pride to a dozen varieties of Indian corn thriving in
his grounds. Tropical plants of all climes he has cajoled or coerced
into living out-of-doors all winter in Norway. One large house full of
begonias was his special pride; tier after tier of the splendid velvet
leaves, all shades of color in the blossoms: one could not have
dreamed that the world held so many varieties of begonia. He was
annoyed by his Victoria regia's tardiness. There it lay, lolling in
its huge lake,--in a sultry heated air which it was almost dangerous
for human lungs to breathe. Its seven huge leaves spread out in round
disks on which a child could stand safe. In the middle, just out of
the water, rose the mysterious red bud. It was a plant he had himself
raised in one year from seed; and he felt towards it as to a child.